I work for a magazine of a large membership organization, and a big part of my job is evaluating submissions made by members about their local chapter’s activities; is it timely, does it fit with the national magazine’s criteria, etc. One part of that involves photos sent in electronically - are they sharp enough, big enough, are people actually looking in the right direction, et cetera.
Up until early this year, 95% or so of the photos we received were JPEGs. Some of them were big enough for us to use (glossy print publications require pretty damn big photos, people!), some not so much, and I have a canned spiel explaining to people why their photos won’t work for us. But I’m seeing something new and wondering where it came from.
Since roughly last December, I’ve seen a lot of submissions coming in in PDF format, and these are almost always completely unusable. Generally speaking, the files are about 100 to 150k in size; when I open them up, even the ones that meet our minimum size requirements (1,500 by 900 pixels) have been compressed so much that they look like crap at full size. I’ve had to reject almost every photo that’s come in in this format.
Anyway, I’m wondering if there’s some new version of Outlook or Word or some other wide-spread software that encourages people to send photos out as PDFs, so that I can explain to the people who are sending them in that they shouldn’t do that.
I have seen this as well. In my case many of the images I am getting are a result of “at home” or “in office” scanners.
I see this with text, images, spreadsheets and so on. Recently I was asked to make a small change a single paragraph in a written bio that was scanned (crookedly I might add) and email to me in a PDF.
Very true. If the PDF arrives as a graphic, that’s probably how it was made. If it was outputted from an application program, the converter would treat text and graphics differently, resulting in a high-quality, scaleable, text-extractable, small-sized, final file.
In contrast, a scanner makes the whole thing into a big graphic blob, usually with low-quality default settings.
Most people haven’t a clue as to the difference. The only good thing that seems to come out of this trend is the file is more likely to be readable than some more arcane file formats I used to get.
As a graphic artist/publication house myself, I feel your pain.
I have never used Microsoft’s products. Open Office has long had a save as a PDF option, but I have never used it much. I do think it produces smaller files.
Yes, I am careful who I send .odf files to. Now, if people could refrain from .docx
Isn’t “print to PDF” a new option in Word? Where you don’t even need Acrobat or a PDF printer.
I know a lot of my clients like to paste pictures in to Word and then send me a Word doc as their “photo.” Perhaps your clients are going the extra mile and printing to PDF?
Aha! I think you’ve got it - the PDFs seem to be taking the place of the Word documents with pasted-in photos we used to get (which were also almost always completely useless), which I now realize have basically dried up.
Yeah, PDFs can contain both editable text and scanned images. At my old job there was a scanner that would save scans to a file, and one of the options was PDF.
However, try to get it through to people that in these cases you only need the image. No Word file, no PDF around it, no compression; just the image.