Can You Shrink the Size of Attachments?

[Les de B]

I have just scanned an old Will, and saved it as a Adobe PDF file (7 pages). I wanted to email the Will to another researcher, however, the size of the attachment was nearly 10MB's, and after 20 minutes of sending, sending, sending, I received a message indicating the message could not be sent, although it is shown in my Sent Box.

Is there a way I can reduce the size of the document, email it, and it be opened up at the other end by the email recipient? Is that what is called a "Zip File", or something like that?

If somebody could help me, it would be appreciated, but be warned simple instructions only as I'm a very basic computer user 

I have Windows XP, Word 207, Excel 2007and Adobe 6, if that helps any?

Les

[newbie]

Hello Les, I'm sure others will give you help but yes you can shrink them.  I use Windows XP and if a photo for example is too large, Windows can shrink this file for you.  But the file is a jpg not an Adobe PDF.  To do this I open My Pictures,  click on the photo and on the left of the screen there are options, click on email this photo and then the message pops up "Windows can make this file smaller". 
There are also various programs that can do this, one is Irfanview which is a free program that you download over the internet. But again I think the file has to be saved as a jpg.
Good luck,
newbie

[newbie]

here's a link for irfanview, I found it by typing "irfanview" into google,
http://www.irfanview.com/
newbie

[Berlin-Bob]

IrfanView will work on most picture formats.  there is also an add-on so you look at .djvu files (FindMyPast), but what Les needs is a normal pack/unpack program, to compress his PDF file.

here's the theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format)

and here are some free programs: http://www.freeware-guide.com/dir/util/filecomp.html


Bob

[Valda]

Ring hand mouse click the pdf (or any document)

'Send To'
'Compressed (zipped) folder'

Windows will then automatically put the document into a compressed zipped folder. However there is a limit to how much anything can be zipped down into sufficient size for you to send on your currect internet service level agreement with your provider - or indeed the recipient of the email's own provider's service level agreement. The more you pay the fast your service and the bigger the attachments you can send.

Otherwise consider scanning at a lower quality in the first place, that will considerably drop the size of the 'mbs' of the final document. Too poor a quality of course and legibility is compromised. Are your original scans jpegs or bmps? Consider scanning as jpegs as they are much smaller. Or send one page, several pages in one document and the rest in another.

Regards

Valda

[stonechat]

pdf already includes some compression so you may not gain enough.
It may be necessary to compress original images more.

If sending is the only problem and you both have fast connections, then try to send using yousendit.com

Bob

[Les de B]

Thanks Newbie for your reply. I was aware of making JPG photo's smaller when sending them, however, as I scanned 7 pages, then saved them in "book" format using PDF I am unable to do this. As Berlin-Bob indicated, I would like to send the attachment as a pack/unpack attachment, and I would like to thank him for his reply too.

The would-be-hopeful recipient of email has just sent me this link on how to shrink the attachment into a Zip file

http://it.cas.psu.edu/Training/HowTo/ENComputers/zip.html

I followed the instructions on the link (which were easy), and was able to shrink the attachment, albiet only to 8MB's from the original 10MBs.

I'll try emailing the attachment again, and hopefully 8MBs will be successful. If worse comes to worse, I will re-scan the Will again page by page, and save each page as a JPG, and then send each page individually on seperate emails.

Les

[Les de B]

Thanks to Valda and Bob for their replies too, received after my last reply to Newbie and Berlin Bob.

It appears what I indicated in that reply relates to Valda's suggestion. While I'll keep Bob's reply in "reserve".

Les

[Nick29]

Look for a utility called WinRAR - it works like Zip, but you can easily break the output down into several smaller files, which will automatically be used when the other person clicks on the first file.  Zip has the ability to break down the output into smaller files, but it's not so easy to recombine them as it is with WinRAR.  Obviously, both the sender and receiver of the files will need WinRAR installed for it to work.