How to export smaller PDFs from InDesign

Ahhhh those pesky large PDFs.

If you have had a multiple page document in InDesign with many vector images, you may have noticed it is difficult to export a reasonably sized PDF.

This is because InDesign exports all vector data, and does not compress it. If you have a vector image placed in an image box within InDesign, even though you only see what is within the box constraints, InDesign will attempt to export ALL the data from that placed file, even what you cannot see. It also does not compress or degrade the image quality of a vector image (isn’t that nice **insert sarcmark**). This began with the CS versions of Adobe software. This results in PDFs that can just won’t get small enough.

If you chose “print to PDF”…

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CSS Web Images Will Save Download Times

Came across this blog post this past weekend:

CSS is the new Photoshop

It’s talking about CSS3 and HTML5’s ability to render graphic elements with absolutely no images involved. The benefit being that you have fewer calls to the server to retrieve images (why CSS sprites have become popular).

The print guys can think of it like Illustrator vs Photoshop. This new process doesn’t use pixels (like Illustrator). Where Photoshop pixels have the overhead of downloading from the server, these can render within the browser itself.

Nested several links deep it gets to this CSS Images example page (requires the latest Safari or Chrome):

It’s not necessarily the slimmest HTML out there (you can see how they…

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IE9 Will Not Be Available For XP

(NOTE: IE9 is not to be released until sometime in 2011)

IE9 is already being highly talked about as having many of the features that developers have been asking for (HTML5, CSS3, Canvas, etc.), but the disappointment for developers is going to be more for the fact that Windows XP users won’t be able to upgrade to IE9 at all.

Internet Explorer users still hover around 70% of all browsers used by the general public.

That breaks down by version:
—IE8: 59%
—IE7: 30%
—IE6: 11%

IE8 has done better at getting users to upgrade than IE7 ever did. But IE6 still hangs around despite (or “in spite”).

Operating systems very similarly show Windows at about 87% of all web users.

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Mind Your Canonical Tags - Latency Issues

We had a site recently that was built to have a number of dynamically generated pages based on geographic locations. These were setup using a URL rewriting tool for “pretty URLs” and as such we wanted to make sure that Google always attributes the page to the nicer “pretty URLs” instead of the possible alternate URLs that include QueryString variables.

For this specific case, Google pioneered the “Canonical Tag” which is a flavor of the LINK tag that looks like this:

<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://dbdnet.com/” />

Where the “href” attribute is the desired URL for the page being looked at.

With this tag Google views it as a recommendation from the web developer…

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