Expert: Glen Demers - 11/12/2008

Question
I have inherited our IT training manuals in INDD (CS3 for PC). The manuals are 200+ pages(hence InDesign and NOT Word for these manuals).

The layout of the manual includes in-margin images of icons (eg. Save topic has Save toolbar icon located to the left about 1" in from left text margin (can email screen dump if this doesn't make sense)).

The original author has linked this and all similar images in this indd to an older manual in pdf format since the images are already there.

The finished manual is 200+ pages and 300+ megs in file size.  Is this large file size due to this image linking and is this a good working way to update manuals rather than insert each small graphic individually? Or would it be better to combine this idea and create my own 'resource document' with just all the images I need for each manual in one document that all refer to since they will all use 80% the same icons such as toolbar icons, menu items, dialog boxes etc?

I am happy to send sample pages or screendumps if that helps.

many many thanks in advance, Danny

Answer
Hi Danny,

That file size seems large to me. Make sure you are linking to the graphics and not embedding them. In the links palette there will be a square icon to the right of the graphics name if it is embedded, go to the small triangle at the upper right of the palette and select unembed from the flyout menu.
The next thing I would do would be to reduce the size of the linked graphics, either by finding the original .eps, jpg or tif graphics before they were distilled into a pdf, opening the pdf in Illustrator or Photoshop to extract the images, or breaking the pdf into single page pdf's and linking to one page pdf's instead of multiple page pdf's.
InDesign supports multiple master pages and that may be a way to simplify production if a lot of you pages use the same icons in the same position.
Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

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