Tooling Around

Reducing the Size of Graphics

By Anonymous; Reprinted from The Blue Pencil, the Pittsburgh STC Chapter Newsletter

If you think capturing a screen shot, copying it to the Windows Clipboard, then pasting it into a Word document is easy, you're right. If you think this is a good way to minimize the size of the finished document, you're wrong.

Why?

When an image is captures and copied to the clipboard, Windows stores the image internally as a bit-mapped graphic (.bmp) file. This is a very inefficient and often bloated file format. Consequently, when the image is pasted into the destination document, its bloated size adds to the overall file size of the document. The more images you copy and paste, the more bloated the document.

An example: I recently updated a document that was 49 pages long, contained about 20 screen captures, and was 7.8 megabytes in size. All of the images were captured using Paint Shop Pro, copied to the Windows Clipboard, then pasted into the document. It was my task to add new content and new screen shots, and replace outdated images with new ones.

For each new image, I did the following:

Captured the screen with Paint Shop Pro.
Saved the image to a .gif format in a scratch folder.
Flipped over to the document.
Inserted the image using Insert > Picture > From File. (To make the process more efficient, I configured Word and Paint Shop Pro to use the same scratch folder.)

When I finished, I had added 33 pages and about 15 new screen shots, and I had replaced 90 percent of the existing screen shots. The document almost doubled in page count and number of images. Yet, the file size reduced to just 1.3 MB!

Saving screen captures as .gif files, then inserting them into a document, does take a few more steps than the simpler copy-and-paste method. But, the advantages gained from reducing file bloat may be worth it.

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