When putting materials online it is often desirable to place them in a non-editable form like PDF (portable document format) which is highly accessible to students. However, it is easy to create very large files which students have trouble downloading. The guidelines below will help reduce file sizes of PDF documents. Converting from Word or PowerPoint will always create smaller, higher quality documents than scanning. NOTE: Office 2003 and 2007 differ in where commands are located, but the same commands are available in both products. Directions are for Office 2003.
|
Source Document |
Procedure |
|
MS-Word |
1. If the document has images select any image, then right click on the picture and select Format Picture. Click on the Compress button. Choose Web/Screen resolution and All pictures. NOTE: If you want to save a version for printing be sure to use Save As to save the file. This process will reduce the resolution of the pictures in the document. 2. Print the document to the Adobe PDF Printer 3. Open the document in Adobe Acrobat and select File | Reduce File Size (Selection of Acrobat 6 or 7 format is a safe option for courses as long as you inform your students that they need to get the free download. |
|
MS-PowerPoint |
1. If the document has images select any image, then right click on the picture and select Format Picture. Click on the Compress button. Choose Web/Screen resolution and All pictures. NOTE: You should do this anyway if you are using digital photos in your presentation since it can greatly reduce the PPT file size and PPT files are presented on the screen. 2. Print the document to the Adobe PDF Printer 3. Open the document in Adobe Acrobat and select File | Reduce File Size (Selection of Acrobat 6 or 7 format is a safe option for courses as long as you inform your students that they need to get the free download. |
|
Scanned From Paper |
1. Scan the document directly to PDF. You can use a copy machine with this feature or use Adobe Acrobat (File | Create PDF from Scanner). 2. Open the document in Adobe Acrobat then attempt to convert the scanned images of the page (very large) to text using the OCR (optical character recognition) function (Document | Recognize Text Using OCR). This function will attempt to convert scanned text to actual characters which requires less storage. Generally 10 or 12 point clearly scanned type will convert well. NOTE: An alternative method that can be used is to use scanning software that does an OCR conversion. Commonly scanners come with some version of this software. The benefit is that you get a document that you can edit; the drawback is that you will need to fix all parts of the document that did not convert correctly. 3. Then select File | Reduce File Size (Selection of Acrobat 6 or 7 format is a safe option for courses as long as you inform your students that they need to get the free download. |