File size is too BIG!! Help!!

[Hyperlord]

I have a completed 40 page 4C magazine. Lots of great pictures (tiffs), artwork (eps) and mucho text. The file size is 440 megs! Is this right?

This is my first huge qxd project - and I really feel like this is just too big of a file and my printer will curse my name when he gets this!

Are my fears unfounded? Anyone here done similar work and had a file this large? Am I missing an important step in making the final product a more manageable file size?

Again - Thanks to you all for reading and helping me during this crisis. Cheers - nate Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.

 

[Ecaboodle]

Does seem like a large file size for Quark. Surprised quark will run with it, you most have some very big images.

You could try breaking it down into chapters, or blocks of 10 pages maybe. Drag the pages using tumbnails. If you can't fix it in 20 minutes call someone who can.

 

[shaneox]

Seems very large for just an xpress file. If you have all the graphics embedded though it could easily reach that size. Normally graphics are just linked and are only included at print time, thus keeping the actual xpress file size low.

 

[Zelandakh]

How did you put the images into Quark? If you pasted them, that is your trouble.

 

[afral]

Only on a PC can graphics be embedded in Quark. I had a customer with the same problem. She embedded all graphics then trash the pix not knowing to LINK them. We get rather large file where I work but the Quark file itself should not be that size. Keep me posted. BTW your file will still fit on a CD -- my customer did not have that luxury. She had to bring her computer in. We added it to our network and transferred the file that way. Boy was she embarrassed! Let freedom ring!

 

[blueark]

TIFF images will also increase your file size more that EPS files (even EPS raster images). This is because, with EPS files, Quark uses the built in preview within the EPS file, if present, whereas with TIFF files, it generates it's own preview and stores it within the Quark document. I would imagine, although I don't know for sure, that if you were using some enhanced preview XTension, it would bloat the file size even more.

 

[afral]

Preview Xtension creates its own file. Let freedom ring!

 

[blueark]

Quite right, afral! Must be working too hard!

 

[blueark]

Just found out a little more about the way Quark creates image previews which may be of interest here. If you import a TIFF (and this probably applies to JPEGs and PICTs too), Quark creates a 72dpi preview of that image which it embeds in the document.

If you have, say, a color tiff that's 3x5 inches, with a resolution of 300dpi, Quark will resample it to 72dpi and embed that into the file. If your application preferences for color tiffs is set to 32-bit, that means the total added to your Quark document will be (((72*3) * (72*5)) * 4)kb, or around 300kb. (Ugh, maths! (72*3) is 3 inches @ 72 dots per inch, (72*5) is 5 inches @ 72 dots per inch. Multiply them to get the total number of dots/pixels. The 4 is 4 bytes, or 32 bits, which is how much memory each pixel takes up.)

Now, suppose, in Photoshop, you change the resolution to 72dpi WITHOUT resampling (ie, the pixels remain the same, but the logical dimensions of the image increase), then Quark interprets the image as 12.5x21 inches. Resampling this image to 72 dpi will essentially embed the image, as it is already at 72 dpi, meaning an extra (((72*12.5) * (72*21)) * 4)kb, or about 5MB is added to the file.

With that in mind, it's quite easy to devise a few strategies to keep the document size down.

1. In Application Preferences/Display, change the color tiff previews to a lower amount (16-bit is a nice balance between quality and performance).

2. Resize your images BEFORE importing them into Quark. In other words, If it's going to be 3x5 inches in Quark, make sure it's around that size before you import it. Execessive downward scaling will add to your file size unneccessarily.