Expert: Ken Black - 10/6/2009

Question
We publish a monthly magazine for the state of Arizona.  Each month we also online publish it to several websites on in particular we use as a viewer embedded in our site which is issuu.com .  Our problem is the size of the pdf's they run between 9 and 12 megs which makes our readers frustrated with the length of load time.

Question:  Is there any way, without sacrificing hotlinks of the magazine or read quality, to shink these files down to size or are there alternatives to pdf I need to know about.

You can view our magazine and back issues at www.aztourist.com and click on current issue or back issues

Thank you in advance for your time and effort.

Answer
Hi Gregory,

In order to answer your question more effectively, I need to ask for some more information.

What software are you creating the magazine with?

What settings are you using when you create the pdf?

When I looked at your site and magazine, as well as many others on issuu.com, I did not notice anything more than what I would consider normal as far as the time it takes to load. Is it possible that some of these complaints are coming from users on dial-up?

While there are ways to compress your pdf further, it may affect the readability of the publication. I already see some degradation from compression in your file now, it may get worse. That all depends on what it is that you are doing currently and what, if anything, I can change.

Let me know the software and settings and lets see what I can do.

Thanks,

Ken Black

www.bestprintingonline.com