nisus.com

Hi,
I'm working on a file that will have three copies of the same image at different points in the document. It will go to print, so it has to be high resolution, about 500K for the image.

I've discovered by a simple save of the rtf file that Nisus doesn't handle this as I'd expect -- it adds 1.5MB to the file size, one 500K for each of the three instances. In other words, each instance is counted as a whole new image file, even though I merely copied and pasted the one file internally in the Nisus document.

Couldn't this be done more elegantly? Like an internal pointer to the single instance?

I'm concerned not so much for the rtf itself, but for the PDF, which will end up going to a place that has a fixed limitation for the file size (iTunes Digital Booket, which I believe is 8MB max).

I note that the PDF file made from the above testing also shows the same behaviour, although it's smaller overall; but it still is larger by the amount of 3 instances, not one instance.

Any way around this, particularly for the resulting PDF?

Steven Rowat

stevenrowat wrote:I've discovered by a simple save of the rtf file that Nisus doesn't handle this as I'd expect -- it adds 1.5MB to the file size, one 500K for each of the three instances. In other words, each instance is counted as a whole new image file, even though I merely copied and pasted the one file internally in the Nisus document.

That's exactly right. RTF requires a separate copy of the image data each time it appears in the file, even if the image is exactly the same. There are other inefficiencies in the way images are saved in RTF, which are explained in this FAQ on large file sizes.

Couldn't this be done more elegantly? Like an internal pointer to the single instance?

There are two ways to save space:
1. Use the "Nisus Compressed Rich Text" file format, which will only store one copy of the image data, even if you use it many times in the same file. The FAQ linked above also explains some other ways that this file format is more space efficient than vanilla RTF.

2. Keep your images external to your document, and use NWP's "link to file" feature when inserting images. Be sure to turn off the option "include copy of image in document". This means your document's images will be reliant on external image files, but this strategy works for vanilla RTF files.

I'm concerned not so much for the rtf itself, but for the PDF, which will end up going to a place that has a fixed limitation for the file size (iTunes Digital Booket, which I believe is 8MB max).

Unfortunately when it comes to PDFs none of these strategies will help you; NWP will not collapse duplicate image data when making a PDF. In fact, the PDF generating toolkit NWP currently uses (provided by OSX) might not allow for this at all. It's possible that feature is exposed in a lower-level toolkit (also provided by OSX), but offhand I'm not sure.