Hi folks

I write the Sheffield Cats Shelter Newsletter. It's a Publisher document (yes, I know that Publisher's awful but it's one of the things that I can use pretty well, and I have it on my computer, and we're a small charity so buying new stuff's out of the window), usually about 20Mb in size, printed out by Pinders and sent out snail mail to the members every couple of months.

We also have a very kind member who does our website. She does web design, I do DTP. I can't do web design, she isn't comfortable with DTP.

I have been asked by the committee to create a newsletter that can be emailed out to members as an alternative to hard copy. My first reaction was to laugh at the thought of the complaints after jamming people's email boxes and their dial ups with a 20Mb file. Since then I have tried to think of a way of doing it- so here are the questions:

Can anybody think of a way of producing one newsletter (not 2 different ones) that will satisfy the email and snail mail needs at the same time?

We need to keep the hard copy going for the members without computers, and it seems an awful lot of faff to have to produce one using different software just to send out to a few dozen members, so can it all be done using one bit of kit?

And if you can think of a way of doing it using Publisher, can you also find a way round the 'my computer won't open your Publisher file' c**p that seems to be the norm?

I'm beginning to think that I'm going to have to bump off soon-to-be-ex-hubby, just to get his G5 with all of its lovely graphics abilities (but since I teach using PCs I know nothing about them except the bits he gloats about).

Please help me!

I made the newsletter for staff at work using Publisher, then used Acrobat distiller to covert it to PDF (handy having the full acrobat suite). This dropped what would be a 15Mb file to, at best compression , just under 2 meg.

Have a scout about on Google for free PDF converters if you can't afford the acrobat package - if you can get Acrobat, then it is much better.

Adobe also offer various publishing tools and software if you fancy checking one of them out. They have the same type of options as Publisher, and can be learnt quite easily.

Check out adobe's site at http://www.adobe.co.uk/products/acrobat/main.html for details of all their products and services.

Having the file in PDF format will get around the "can't open it" problem as the Acrobat reader is free to everyone, and comes on practically every installation disc nowadays (games/app designers like to put their instructions in a PDF file, so provide the Acrobat reader to open it).

If you don't fancy buying Adobe PDF writer, try CUTE PDF. It's completely free and the end results are the same.

Just remember to try and scale your pictures down in Publisher if you can before making the PDF - our school newsletter writer takes 4Mp images and just grabs one corner of it and shrinks them to fit the column, and she wonders why the file is 45Mb! It makes my life a misery when PDFing them for the school website!

I've written a mailing list program for a couple of my clients and the biggest nightmare we've had is getting the newsletters small enough to not swamp the mail server! However, as we're typically sending out 4000 a night for 20 nights in a row, I guess we have a scaling difference between us wnd what you need.

However, even a 2Mb e-mail will cause some people problems - if anyone gets their mail from within a business firewall, 2Mb may be too big.

PDF is a good idea - most people will have Adobe Reader installed if they're 'frequent users' but some may still labour on without it. HTML export from Publisher might be possible - it's ages since I've used Publisher.

Problem with HTML, though, is that some people refuse to accept HTML mail. Adobe attachments will almost always get through.

Alternatively, send a text e-mail with a link to a PDF or HTML file on your web server. That way they can get at it without having to keep the mailon their machine forever, and you have an archive of newsletters.

Joe

I agree with Joe, don't send out a newsletter with big attachments. Make the web work for you and send a link out to the html version of the newsletter. Keep the traffic down.

You could even put the resulting pdf online. Make sure you downsample all images to 72dpi though or it will end up large.

Thanks for your ideas guys- I can see that I'm going to have to do a bit of learning to solve this one.

One more question crops up at this point- I'm sorry for being an idiot Phan, but how do I downsample images?

Currently I use scanned or emailed photos at the best resolution so that they will photocopy well, saved as jpegs, although occasionally I do get a bitmap sent to me that is big enough to jam my email box. Beautiful images but a bit cumbersome.

I think I might print out the whole thread to show to the committee members who don't understand the problem with sending out the newsletter as it stands.

Originally posted by medusa666
One more question crops up at this point- I'm sorry for being an idiot Phan, but how do I downsample images?

Idiot? Hardly, I frequently mess up with dpi, screen resolutions and printer resolution.

Your images in the DTP paste-up will be in the region of 220-300 dpi. So if your image is 2" x 3" then it will be 600 x 900 pixels..

What you need to do is resize your image to 72dpi. At 2" x 3" that would be 144 x 216 pixels. This file should be approximately one tenth of the file size.

This image, embedded in a pdf, will take much less time to load.

If you are using Adobe Acrobat to create PDFs, then you can elect to have it downsample the images for you, in an automatic web optimisation option somewhere...

If you have a PDF newsletter that needs paring down to fit on the web, I may be able to help.

Thanks for the thoughts folks, there will now follow a period of learning and negotiating with committee, website bod etc, while I decide what we're going to do.

I think that the website hosted pdf with an email link sounds like a good idea, and it turns out that the vast majority of the images that I have stored are already at 72dpi, so I'll just have to make sure that new ones are too.

If you ever visit the website and find the newsletter on it, you'll know I've been successful.

The solution would be to put the newsletter on the website, then send out a brief email saying the newsletter can be viewed at www.whatever.com/novembernews.html

Originally posted by alchresearch
IJust remember to try and scale your pictures down in Publisher if you can before making the PDF - our school newsletter writer takes 4Mp images and just grabs one corner of it and shrinks them to fit the column, and she wonders why the file is 45Mb! It makes my life a misery when PDFing them for the school website!

People who downsize images in Publisher really annoy me as when it comes to printing all you get is really grainy, pixelated images that basically look crap. You are best of putting the 'highest' quality image into publisher if you are using it for printing.

However when it comes to PDF (never used cute pdf so I don't know about that one) the option is there for it to reduce the image size when creating it. Just remember to use that option.

A free way to create pdfs is to install this program: http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/pdfcreator/Patch02-PDFCreator-0_8_0.exe

Pdf creator adds what looks like a new printer to the computer, in publisher, to create a pdf, go to print the newsletter as normal but instead of using your normal printer, select the pdf creator icon. This will then turn the document into a pdf, for free :)

Heres the website: http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.htm

Originally posted by Skatiechik
People who downsize images in Publisher really annoy me as when it comes to printing all you get is really grainy, pixelated images that basically look crap. You are best of putting the 'highest' quality image into publisher if you are using it for printing.

However when it comes to PDF (never used cute pdf so I don't know about that one) the option is there for it to reduce the image size when creating it. Just remember to use that option.

Yes, but you have to take download times into account and in my case above where the user just took a massive picture and dragged it to fit one of the page columns, rather than re-sizing the picture in a photo editing application first.