PDF art

[Charles Gray]

So, how much art should be in a PDF product? To put it in a different way, how much art is helpful, and when does it make the PDF so large as to cause problems with downloads or viewing?

[jgbrowning]

Originally posted by Charles Gray
So, how much art should be in a PDF product? To put it in a different way, how much art is helpful, and when does it make the PDF so large as to cause problems with downloads or viewing?

We have an on_screen version with art, and a printer version with no art. We've only gotten one guy asking for the art to be in the printer version, while a lot of people told us they were glad there was no art in the printer version.

The book is long (135pages), so experiences may be different for other, shorter works. We put a picture about every two pages as well as border art.

In general, people want art to break up the text but don't want to pay to print it out. Either way you go you're not going to make everyone happy.


joe b.

[HellHound101]

In a typical 64 page PDF, art will not cause problems in the file size if you are compressing your file properly. There is little perceived difference between a 1 meg and a 3 meg PDF. At 3 megs you can include a fair amount of art, easily a fair-sized piece every 4 pages.

[dalziel_86]

There's also the option of putting in buttons that let the reader change whether or not art is displayed.

Eilfin Publishing have done this with Issue 3 of their 'Undiscovered: Quests & Adventures' e-zine.

I think it's a damn fine idea, and something that any PDF publisher should consider. But I'm darned if I know how they did it. Anyone with super Acrobat-Fu want to explain it?

[Malak]

The important thing is to get your formatting correct.

I have the same black and white pen & ink drawing compressed right here in my desktop (approx 8 x 18 cm) in three different ways into a PDF image:

A) 150 dpi greyscale, zip encoding: 108 KB
B) 150 dpi greyscale, jpg encoding: 86 KB
C) 600 dpi B+W bitmap, zip encoding: 59 KB

A & B are both not print quality, C (the smallest) is. Hell, it’s as near as dammit press quality. Knowing how to compress things correctly is essential to getting both file sizes down & picture quality up.

Martin Cutbill

[NPC Slavor]

Of course, with black-and-white pen and ink, you can do even better (both for file size and print resolution) by vectorizing it (no need for Corel Trace or Streamline for this, either; Photosop can vectorize line art very cleanly). For strictly black-and-white images ... unless they're very complex ... vector formats are usually superior.

[Malak]

Yeah, cool.

Most of my linework it too complex, but when it isn't, bizzarely I use Flash to vectoize it!

Martin.

[Malak]

Yeah, so to update, linework vectored down (from my press quality original) to 282 KB, a hefty increse on the other formats due to the complexity of the image, but well worth looking at if you are dealing with simple line art.

[Charles Gray]

Originally posted by NPC Slavor
Of course, with black-and-white pen and ink, you can do even better (both for file size and print resolution) by vectorizing it (no need for Corel Trace or Streamline for this, either; Photosop can vectorize line art very cleanly). For strictly black-and-white images ... unless they're very complex ... vector formats are usually superior.

How precisely do you do that? Just save as a vector file type or is there a filter?

[Malak]

ADDENDUM:

Vector linework can look kinda crappy onscreen in Acrobat Reader.

[Paraplegic Racehorse]

Originally posted by Malak
Vector linework can look kinda crappy onscreen in Acrobat Reader.
Got news for you. It looks even worse in non-Adobe PDF readers such as GhostView, GGV, and xPDF.