Word tables in pdf format are highly inefficient

[Justin Hess]

Hi There,

I've got a huge task of pdf'ing 13000 mail merge documents... however that
part of the process i've been able to automate. The problem is that the pdf's
that are generated from the post script files are exceptionally large! The
problem appears to be because of the tables in the documents... Is there any
way of making the word document tables more efficient? especially with the
use of dotted lines!
Thanks in advance!

 

[Jezebel]

The only reason you could have for creating 13000 mailmerge PDFs is that
you're planning to email them. Spam, in other words. Keep pushing your head
upwards until you can feel your spleen between your teeth. Then bite down
hard.

 

[Justin Hess]

Thanks jez
acutally working for a non-profit organisation in South Africa that's
helping the government with a study on poverty in the Western Cape. Part of
the research uses personalised questoinnaires that get sent out once a year
to the various individuals.... i.e. a shit load of work! hence the need to
pdf each questionnaire to be sent off to a local printer company.... imagine
printing 13 000 booklets inhouse... yah!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It's also just barely possible that Justin works for a central billing
company of some sort.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I would suggest that it has something to do with the way that you are
creating the .pdf files. Where do the postscript files come into it. If I
use the Adobe PDF printer to create a .PDF file from a Word document, it is
invariably significantly smaller in size than the Word document - between
1/3 and 1/4 of the file size.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Jezebel]

A central billing company wouldn't be wasting time with this sort of
amateurish technique.

 

[macropod]

Hi Justin,

The problem here is that the later versions of Word produce extremely
verbose postscript files en-route to the PDFs. Older versions of Word
generated much more compact output.

For compactness, you would probably do better to have postscript files
generated professionally. These could then be converted to relatively small
PDFs.

Cheers