Gentle Spiders,
First, apologies for not replying to each and every one of you who'd
written me with suggestions -- on and off list -- there's too many of
you, wonderful people :) That's not to say I have not appreciated your
input; in fact, I spent most of today testing the various options
(beginning with the easiest ones, which didn't require downloading any
'forreign material "<g>)
Today's consensus had been "send the text as a .pdf file" with various
suggestions on how to do it. Some people, taking my measure, added "if
you can" to "send as pdf" :) And one -- who's been watching my
half-brained antics on Arachne for years and who first steered me to
Mac -- sent *very easy* instructions...
With the help of those and the services of a willing "guinea pig"
(thanks, *both* Sue-s!), I arrived at this conclusion:
A .pdf file is the the most universal and easiest way of receving text,
and the easiest one for me, too. I cannot convert to the pdf via the
Save As, the same way I can to Windows XP etc. What I can do -- and it
really is way simpler -- is open the document (as I would have to
anyway), hit Print and pause long enough to notice that there's a "save
as pdf" button on the print order...:) The Adobe Reader icon appears
magically (I Save To: Desktop) and I can drag it into the body of the
e-mail. Piece of cake :)
Sending the text file is "iffy", to say the least. Yes, anyone can
receive it, because it's stripped of all formatting. Incuding the line
breaks; one recipient described it as text that was a mile long :)
Since I absolutely *hate* having to scroll, left/right, right/left,
left/right... through text, I'm not going to inflict this punishment on
others :)
Now, the scanned images... Danek taught me how to Save to File-> Save
As pdf which, again, brings up the Adobe Reader. But, last night, when
I sent such a pd effed file of a scan to David, he complained that it
was too big. I should have used a jpeg, he said. That was news to me; I
have never seen (at least not so I can remember) a jpeg file that was
not a *photo* (from a digital camera). So, naturally, I told him off in
no uncertain terms :)
But, today, my guinea pig confirmed: it's OK to send line drawings
(diagrams, prickings, etc) as pdfs but it's better to send them as
jpegs, because they take up much less bandwidth. Gifs would be ideal,
she said.
Well, gifs aren't in my range of options for saving scans but jpegs
*are*. I can even make a double-trouble, .pdf.jpeg file :) My "scan the
image" experiments, which I then dragged off the Desktop into e-mails
to self and printed out came up with the following statistics:
1) The .pdf file, when printed out, produced an image which was smaller
than the original source (ca 87%). The message which included it came
in at 794KB, the attachment itself was 587KB.
2) The .jpeg file gave me an image which printed out at about 163% of
the source and came in at 204KB (attachment 150KB)
3) The mixed .pdf.jpeg file produced an image that was ca 175% of the
source and came in at 199KB (the attachment was 146KB)
All scans were done at 300dpi though some variations in size might be
due to the fact that each time the image was cropped separately. The
scanned images which are e-mailed directly (instead of being Saved As
and To) seem to come through at the same size as the source (100%) but
take up the largest amount of KBs (and seem to be converted to a pdf
willy-nilly). So it's still a matter of choice: 1) no fiddling at your
end but a large file (e-mail); 2) some fiddling at your end, but a
"middling" file (pdf) which takes up more paper space 3) fiddling at
your end, small file (jpeg) and more paper for printing out.
At the moment, I'm inclined to send pdfs for both images and text. But
if any of you are bandwidth-restricted, please let me know and I'll
send the images as jpegs. I do remember -- all to well -- how many
times I cursed people whom I considered my friends but who sent me
messages over 250KB :)
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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