[SoFoBoMo] rejected

[parsenome]

My CreateSpace submission was rejected. No spine text on books less than 130 pages, and they recommend redoing the contents because it has images of between 130 and 250 DPI. If you'll remember, I had to resize to 250DPI to get the book < 100M.

Looks like I have some more work ahead of me.

Comments

Why so large?

[ext_100877]

It's good to see another SoFoBomoer finished but I wonder why your file is so large. Unless your book format is huge (either very large pages or very large number of pages) you should easily be able to get under 100MB. Resizing images as high quality JPEGs (Photoshop level 10 or jpeg compression 95) at 300ppi should yield images that are around 1MB each.

Re: Why so large?

[parsenome]

My book size is 8x10, with the image in the upper 8x8 and the lower 2" being reserved for caption and page numbers. The images are all 2x3 aspect ratio, so they don't even take up the full 8x8.

I resized them to 300dpi 8.00"x5.33" (2400x1600 pixels) and saved as high resolution JPGs. That did indeed get them down below 1M - most are at most half of that. They total up somewhere around 40-50 megs. Even before downsizing, they totaled less than 100 megs, so it was actually making them larger when it put them into the PDF (as reported by the PDF optimizer in Acrobat).

The only thing I can think of is that the huge file size was somehow locked in when I originally created the document using full size images, and is upsampling the lower resolution files to get back to the original. This despite the info tab for the included images showing that they're 300x300 DPI.

I think my next step is rebuilding the book from scratch, using images that have already been downsampled to 300DPI to start with.

Re: Why so large?

[ext_100877]

I think what's happening is Acrobat is outputting everything in default 600ppi with ZIP compression, hence the enlargement. What you need to do is use Distiller to get the image output in JPEG format. Apply appropriate resolution/compression settings. Should do the job (I'm a bit rusty on Acrobat).

Re: Why so large?

[parsenome]

I'm actually outputting from InDesign, rather than Distiller. It gives me a compression settings dialogue, where I'm telling it to save images as 300DPI JPEGs. Apparently it doesn't work properly.

I don't have Distiller, but I do have Acrobat Professional, which lets me use the exact same dialogue - which only seems to have effect if I significantly downsample (going from 300 - 299 actually increases file size, 300 - 250 cut it in half (which is larger than the proportional decrease in number of pixels).