Graphics and Text - Design

[awilson3rd]

Hello,

Am just looking to get some feedback as to the best way to combine graphics and text for smaller file sizes and better quality so was wondering what design processes many people use.

I currently use photoshop for the design elements on a page with some text as the actual design element. The trouble is when using photoshop for real text the quality is not great and the resulting size of the output (jpg, png or gif) is usually quite high if I want to keep the quality there. Even when the quality is high the text still doesn't look that great with photoshop.

I have also tried an image imported in Swishmax, then added the text for the page and exported this to a swf file. The text looks much better when set to pixel text and the resulting file size didn't increase too much from the original jpg file. The problem is this is just another extra step which I was trying to avoid. Saying that though I guess for url links etc this would be the preferable option.

Is there another way though? For example PDF? Would this keep a reasonable file size and maintain good quality. But, would I still need to add the text in photoshop and then export to PDF? Would the PDF render the text better than the view of it I get in photoshop?

Thanks for any advise,

Andrew

[gtech]

I'm new to ebooks, but what I always used to make PDF files is Page Plus from Serif. That way, I can combine photos and texts anyway I like.

So I will use the same method to produce a PDF file that I will then convert with the MZ3 tools pdf2swf.

Gilles

[Hans Nücke]

Just some quick notes (more to come with the tutorials):
As Gilles pointed out, a workflow using PDF is a quite good compromise. Especially if you have some text you need to scale (zoom).
Text will be kept as vector text (not pixels) when converted into swf files.
That's why you can extremly zoom in and the text still looks clear and sharp. With reasoable small file sizes.
In most cases the standard settings produce decent quality. You could tweak in setting the PDF parameters (DPI e.g.) and pdf2swf switches.

There are different ways to create a PDF: some use InDesign (more the pros; pretty expensive), but also MS WORD is an option (not sure if that will work as smooth as it does for me, since I have Adobe Acrobat installed). And other tools, as mentioned by Gilles.

ANother big advantage of having PDF files as the common base is the option to include links (as you already mentioned) and using the search feature of MeagZine3.
For search you need a swf file to get the hit highlighted, and a text file (the search index) that will be used for the search.
That text file can be created even with Acrobat Reader (Export text).

For the conversion from PDF to swf there are tools already available (and I'll provide a new set with the tutorials) that help to crate a bookd oout of a PDF file.
And once that is available you could start "optimizing", i.e. adding images or other elements to pages

Just a quick "heads up"...

[awilson3rd]

Hello and thanks for the reply.

What  started to do was create the graphics page in photoshop, save this as a high res jpg and then add the
text in a flash application (swish). What I found though was that using a swf on each page really slowed the page
turning to a point where it seemed really delayed but the swf was the same size as the jpg with text (around 150kb). So I need to
think of another way, perhaps as you say as a pdf. The benefit of using a swf file is that I can easily add web links, email etc to the
swf itself before exporting.

Thanks

Andrew

[Hans Nücke]

^First: MegaZine3 cannot handle PDFs directly. They needed to be converted into swf before. So swf is most probably the best way.
You should try different parameters. that are available on bookd, page and element level.
Like "buffer": http://www.megazine3.de/doc/Page#buffer

If you use batchpages, this will be the first flag of the settings parameter; like

Code: (xml)

          settings(true, false, false, false, false)"> 

If you build the pages one by one (not with the batchpages plugin), then you should try:
<page buffer="true" >

You also should test with buff_aa and buffer_animate set to "false".
Check those parameters availble and see if there are other options that could improve the performance of your books.

Another way is to reduce dpi during convertion...

At the end it all depends on the number of vectors (characters) on the page. So if you could use bigger fonts and more pages would also help ;-)

And as another approach: you could use small, low quality jpg images for lower zoom levels and only swithc to higher quality jpg or swf files if the zoom level is set higher than the trigger level defined by scale.

[awilson3rd]

Thanks for the reply.

I don't use zoom at all so this shouldn't be a problem and the only graphic element on a page is the actual jpg background image. Then the text is added on top of this in the swf file so it must be the text that is causing it to slow down (I pressume). I will check with the page buffer settings.

Thanks again for the advise,

Andrew