Re: Document size?

[Iain Harrison <iharrison -at- SCT -dot- CO -dot- UK>]

>>

Ok...ok....this is getting completely ridiculous now. I have a 66
page document, containing about 50 bitmap graphics (screen shots,
etc all fairly small.), all 256 colors or less. A table of contents
and a small (1.5 pages) index. No tables. Only two fonts (Arial and
Palatino). The file is nearly 6 megs! Do the Word gurus on this
list have any words of wisdom? I'll listen to about anything, but
here's what I tried already:

Do any known  viruses bloat files like this?
     <<

     Yes: Winword!

 Your problem is the way that Word stores graphics in documents. They are not
 compressed at all, and seem to be 'larger than life' in filesize within a Word
 file.

 What to do to sort it out

 For each graphic:

 1. export it (or get it from the source again) into Paintshop Pro

 2. make sure that the graphic isn't bigger than it needs to be, and crop it to
 size if possible.

 3. make sure that the file doesn't have too many colours in it. Use PSP's
 reduce colour depth feature to get it to 256 colours maximum, 16 colours if
 possible.

 4. save as in LZW compressed TIF file format.

 5. import the graphic back into Word, but make sure that the checkbox for 'link
 to file' is selected, and that 'save picture in document' is deselected.

 For the file in general:

 1. Go into tools|options|save. Deselect 'allow fast saves' and select 'save
 native picture formats only'

 2. Use Save as... to save the file.

 After all that you should find your file sizes a fraction of their former
 selves. The downside to all this is that if you move the files, you will have
 to update the links using the Edit|Links dialog box's Change Source function.

 Whilst you are tweaking things, if you are using Word6, you may also want to
 add the following lines to the [Microsoft Word] section of your winword6.ini

 CACHESIZE=2048
 BitmapMemory=2048

 You'd be amazed how much that will speed Word's handling of large files!

 Iain