August, 2001 Diablo Blue Page 3
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Fun and Games (not!) with Microsoft Publisher by Ron Ogg, DVPC |
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Well, I guess it's just fate. If you read the "July, 2001 Announcement" story on the first page of last month's issue of Diablo Blue, you read the following glowing comment I made about Office XP… or, more exactly, about Microsoft Publisher 2002 which is part of Office XP Professional:
'Publisher (which I use for this newsletter) saves files that are about 60% smaller than Publisher 2000. If you've been sitting on the fence about upgrading, take another look at Office XP.'
It's amazing how things can come back to bite you in the posterior. If you've been wondering why the Web edition of the July Diablo Blue was so late, it's because of a wee change Microsoft made to Publisher 2002. One small step forward for Microsoft, one GIGANTIC step backward for some Publisher users, including yours truly!
Here's the short form of how the monthly edition of Diablo Blue has been generated in printed and Web versions, using Microsoft Publisher 2000:
The publication from the prior month is copied to the current month's folder and the file is renamed to the current month and year.
Create Web Site from Current Publication menu item.
The old articles are deleted, the page headings are changed to the current month and year, and the calendar is deleted.
The new articles are copied to the now mostly empty publication, the calendar is updated, and the document is saved.
The master for California Copy Source (our printer) is printed.
The file is saved as a Web site using the
Step 5 generates about 11 or 12 GIF or JPG graphics files (from the images that are part of every issue) the largest of which is 79 KB for the Value Net ad, and all of the rest much smaller, and 16 HTML files (one for each page of the publication). At the top of each page there are links to the first, prior, and next pages of the publication to make navigation easier. All of these files (not including the Adobe Acrobat pdf file for the month's issue) total about 302 KB. Not bad at all!
So I rushed home from the Office XP event at the Metreon, gleefully installed Publisher 2002 that came as part of the copy of Office XP that I had purchased. Creating the July newsletter was a snap, and (as I reported above) the publication's file size was a amazingly smaller than with Publisher 2000. I generated the July issue of Diablo Blue using Publisher 2002, printed the master pages, and took it to California Copy Source so it would be ready for Peggy Johnson to pick up, stamp, and mail to all of the eager DVPC members who get the printed edition. That takes care of steps 1 through 4 outlined above. And the file size was less than 40% of the size of the prior month's issue. Good Publisher! Very, very good Publisher!!
Next, I went to step 5. The steps to save the July publication as a Web page looked more-or-less the same as Publisher 2000. So far, so good.
No, so far so horribly bad! Bad Publisher! Bad, bad Publisher!!
Instead of 11 or 12 graphics files, there were over 100. And some were huge (like one at 360 KB).
There were 16 page files. That's OK, one per page of the publication. But there were a bunch of other files, some with a .XML extension, and some with strange file extensions.
And here's the real kick to the posterior: these files totaled over 1.8 MB in size. That's versus only 302 KB when the same thing was done using Publisher 2000. That's 6 times larger, folks!
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