Creating e-Clippings

[Gene Wilburn]

I posted a blog entry today that might interest some of you. How to make sharable, electronic copies of articles you've written for publications that don't publish online:

http://genewilburn.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/creating-e-clippings/

It uses as an example one of my magazine pieces published in 2010.

Gene

[DaveB]

Your method makes a very nice looking package, Gene. My only concern would be that the file size is a bit hefty. Although I haven't tried it, I'd be inclined to try to OCR the article with OmniPage and convert the results from that exercise either into a PDF or HTML. The text part of the file would be a lot smaller and text on the screen would probably be a bit crisper. This approach should make for a somewhat more downloadable product, and OmniPage can sometimes be had inexpensively if you are willing to take a version that is one or two numbers behind the current one. (I just bought OmniPage v.15 for $19.95; latest is v.17)

I agree that 150 dpi makes for a better printed appearance, but it boosts the file size. Since (as I recall) the computer screen only shows 72 dpi, I wonder why that wouldn't be enough for the scan of images to be viewed on the computer.

-Dave

[Gene Wilburn]

Dave, your concerns are good ones. And this is just A method, not THE method.

Printability is a prime concern for me because this is part of my decluttering/downsizing project. I have stacks of mags and clipping piles around only because I have a piece in them. I want to get them off my shelves, but I want to be able to reproduce them on demand.

I need to experiment more. I could perhaps use a lower-quality jpeg and still get what I want, which would cut down their size.

I don't actually think the file sizes of these are that bad. Most of the stuff I download on a regular basis (e.g. podcasts) are much larger.

OCR isn't an option for me because I want to preserve the look of the published pieces. I use them to show to new editors when I pitch a story and they want to see a writing sample. A little pizazz never hurts. Especially if my photos have been used to illustrate the story. Let's them know I'm a competent photographer as well.

Gene

[Chet]

I left a comment on Gene's blog and we had a short discussion there.

I scan printed materials directly to PDF. I use CutePDF Pro which lets me merge different PDF files. CutePDF Pro also has editing features such as adding notes, comments, and text boxes, too. There's also a "reduce file size" feature. So does Adobe Acrobat, altho I'm not sure if it's available in both the regular and Pro versions, or just the latter.

Unfortunately, CutePDF is only available for Windows.

[Gene Wilburn]

Chet, that's a pretty cool system. Are scanned PDFs any smaller than JPGs, or about the same size?

Gene

[Liz M.]

Has anyone found anything similar to CutePDFPro for the Mac?

[Gene Wilburn]

Has anyone found anything similar to CutePDFPro for the Mac?

I've not tried it, but PDFpen seems similar:

http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/

There's a free trial version on the site.

Gene

[Chet]

Gene

My apologies for not seeing your question whether scanned PDFs are smaller than JPGs. The answer is I don't know because I've never compared them. Also, I usually save scanned images as JPGs and scanned documents as PDFs, so I don't have the same document in JPG and PDF.

However, CutePDF has a feature that reduces a PDF's file size.

[Gene Wilburn]

No apologies necessary, Chet.

Actually, I scanned a page to PDF and compared file size to a JPG, and the PDF was smaller. What I haven't done is compare two clippings done this way. I suspect PDF all the way through would produce the smallest file.

Gene