Pavis Redux File Sizes

[svensson]

So a question for @Ian A. Thomson and anyone else who can answer it.

The files sizes for the new Pavis ebook editions are HUGE, some topping 200 mb. I'm not all that up on epublishing but is there a way to reduce the file sizes on your end without having to zip them?

[Joerg]

4 minutes ago, svensson said:

So a question for @Ian A. Thomson and anyone else who can answer it.

The files sizes for the new Pavis ebook editions are HUGE, some topping 200 mb. I'm not all that up on epublishing but is there a way to reduce the file sizes on your end without having to zip them?

Have you tried "print to pdf" with different resolution?

[Ian A. Thomson]

Apparently some prints to pdf do have the option to adjust resolutions, but mine doesn't unfortunately

[Brian Duguid]

I've just run #4 through a PDF optimiser, and can only get a 181MB file down to 165MB with images at 300dpi, or 149MB at 150dpi. So unless there's something else clogging up the file (e.g. duplicated page background images), I'm not sure what else could be done. That can be tested by removing the page backgrounds, but that would be a quicker job for the author than for me ...

[Iressi]

Hello!

I was able to get all the files quite a bit smaller using a online PDF compressor.

The biggest one is now the Secrets of the Borderlands at 51 mb.

I used the one on the site pdf2go to do this and it worked pretty well. Some of the images are a bit more blurry but overall it loads much faster now. I got City on the Edge of Forever down to 14 mb.

Edited July 10 by Iressi

[mfbrandi]

On 7/3/2024 at 11:36 AM, Ian A. Thomson said:

Apparently some prints to pdf do have the option to adjust resolutions, but mine doesn't unfortunately

Yeah, mine doesn’t either, but if anyone is feeling brave, they can do it on the command line using ghostscript — documentation here — example here.

I confess that the dpi changing options for bitmaps are a bit beyond me, but the example linked above seems to use the -dPDFSETTINGS switch to shortcut the detail (if image resolution is already low, it seems to leave the image alone and just shrinks the hi-res images). Using “-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook” on the RQ Colouring Book brought the 300 dpi images down to 150 dpi and in greyscale brought the whole thing down from 134 MB to 17 MB, so size savings are there if you need them. If you go mad with the options, you can get some horrible lo-res PDFs, but always output to a different file name and mess about. There are options to remove all images should you need to strip it right down to the bone.

[Ian A. Thomson]

Part of the issue is likely that I only ever want to do one layout, so from the beginning I have been doing the PoD version with large scale images etc

So I imagine the images are part of what makes it a very large file