How to Reduce the Size of your Book
You must send an electronic copy of your completed book, including covers, to chris@writeabookinaday.com before 8.00pm. Write-a-Book-in-a-Day monitors the arrival of your book to ensure fairness in that every team has finished on time. If you are transmitting your book by email, please compress your book. We suggest one of your team experiments with compressing a document before your writing date. You can reduce the size of your books for transmission by email as follows:
Write-a-Book-in-a-Day prefers you to send your books as MSWord documents if you have written them in MSWord.
Sending any file as a .pdf document.
If you prefer to send a .pdf, then PLEASE find the 'Advanced' options in your .pdf writer pop-up panel and set the quality to 100dpi or 'screen' or 'web'. The default on most of the pdf writers is 'print' quality which often makes the .pdf larger that the MSWord version. The normal method of creating a .pdf is to print as normal but select the .pdf writer instead of your normal printer.
There is a process some teams have used for generating .pdf documents which seems to involve a multi-function device scanning the pages and greating a .pdf that is composed of images instead of the original mix of text and illustrations. Please avoid this process if you can use one of the other options.
Sending an MSWord File from earlier versions of MSWord eg 2003
Compressing the images in a document will greatly reduce the file size, enabling the document to be emailed quicker
- Click on any illustration. A picture toolbar will appear
- In the tool bar there is an icon of four converging arrows. The hover says 'Compress Pictures"
- Click on the icon and a Compress Picture panel appeara
- Select 'All Pictures in Document', 'Web/Screen', 'Compress Pictures', and 'Delete cropped areas of pictures'
- Click OK
Save your converted book with a different name and send it as an email attachment. Keep you original version for printing copies of your book.
Sending an MSWord File from later versions of MSWord eg 2007
In newer versions of MSWord
- click on any illustration. The 'Picture tools' option appears in the top menu.
- Click on 'Picture tools'
- In the 'Adjust' panel in the menu, click on 'Compress Pictures'
- Click on 'All pictures in document', 'Web/Screen', 'Compress Pictures', and 'Delete cropped areas of pictures'
Save your converted book with a different name and send it as an email attachment. Keep you original version for printing copies of your book.
Sending your book by www.yousendit.com
You can send very large files through www.yousendit.com. This is free for a trial period, but read the terms and conditions and be aware of charges that may arise after the 14 day trial period. Write-a-Book-in-a-Day prefers that you to reduce your file sizes and transmit by email as an MSWord document rather than using yousendit.com.
