kiss those massive PDF files goodbye!

Textkit Community Open Board
1

I’m demoing Adobe Acrobat 6.0 to test out the much talked about (in PDF circles) adaptive compression. It’s the real deal! With very little image loss PDF files can be compressed over 50%!

There is one small catch, adaptive compression required Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 and above.

I’m currently reprocessing ALL Textkit files starting with the largest and working my way down.

Smyth - Was 41 MB - now only 16 MB. All the other files have enjoyed similar results.

About 20 files are making their way online right now.


Jeff

2

That’s great. I wonder if it’ll be noticeably different when I browse and scroll through the huge Symth book.

3

I see the difference only a bit and that might be because I’m looking for it. It’s also less of a difference when printing which is very important.

i’m leaving all the high res still on the server, so if you want to switch to it it, just remove the _AR5 from the URL.

AR5 is my note in the file name for Acrobat Reader 5.0 required.

jeff

4

Yeah, I just tested it out right now and I agree. I’ll spare some of your bandwidth :slight_smile: since I see no reason to download other compressed versions if I have the originals in my hard drive already.

I think someone with poorer eyesight might complain about having to zoom in further because there are some parts of each page that has slightly blurry patches. I wouldn’t know because my eye is pretty decent.

So are you going to only have compressed books from now on, or will new books have both compressed and uncompressed PDFs?

5

I’ll probably keep things simple and go with adaptive compression for here on out. I was thinking about providing both formats, but it might cause more confusion than it’s worth.

That fuzzy look is harder to get use to, but it’s only there at certain magnifcations. It’s bad for me around 150%, but when viewing both an adpative compression and non adaptive side by side at 200% I can barely tell the difference.

6

Wicked cool! Thanks Jeff.

7

Jeff–Thanks for taking the time to redo all those files! I noticed that some books have a paper-saving file for printing–is this something that will also be with all new books, or just a select few?

Thanks again!!

8

hi eris,

I haven’t made the paper savers lately because I’m still having problems getting them converted right. For whatever reason, the software (FinePrint) will scale the size of the image down about 25% making the text very small. I’m sure it’s a mistake I’m making somewhere with the conversion settings and I’ll get it worked out someday.

Today I actually deleted all the paper savers and when I get the problem solved, I’ll reprocess them. Typically i just make paper savers here and there based upon what I think visitor might be interested in printing but I should make them for all files.

Great bibliography in the other thread, I’ll reply to that shortly.

thanks again,
jeff

9

My thanks, too, jeff!
We all could save the hard disk. And the download will take less time for those using a slow connection.

10

I’d stick with one format, and a note telling visitors what level of Adobe they need. When I first found Textkit, I downloaded one of the books which wouldn’t open - I was backlevel on Adobe. Might save some bandwidth up front, and also stop a few questions from ever occuring.