Reduce the size of Layout picture

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Fri, 11/09/2012 - 09:18 am

Today when I tried to copy and paste 8 Layout graphics to one Word document I found that the Word document becomes 15MB in size which is difficult and slow to manipulate even on my i7 Macbook Pro with 8GB ram and SSD.


Is there any way or method to control or reduce the picture size of Layout?

Thank you and regards,
What is the nature of your Igor graphs - 1D waves or image plots?

What is the size of your waves, how many traces per graph and how many graphs in the layout?

What format are you using to export to Word?

November 9, 2012 at 09:48 am - Permalink

hrodstein wrote:
What is the nature of your Igor graphs - 1D waves or image plots?

What is the size of your waves, how many traces per graph and how many graphs in the layout?

What format are you using to export to Word?


It is just a 1D wave plot of 1 trace. Actually I just use copy and paste it directly to Word.

Will "copy" make a huge file if the wave is very large? Will the file size reduce if using export instead?

November 10, 2012 at 06:50 am - Permalink

Quote:
It is just a 1D wave plot of 1 trace. Actually I just use copy and paste it directly to Word.


To fully understand what is going on I would need to know the graphics format that you are using. The graphics format used when you do Edit->Copy is determined by the settings in the Edit->Export Graphics dialog.

I recommend that you use the Edit->Export Graphics dialog rather than Edit->Copy so you can see what options you have and what options you are using. Later, after you have settled on a format, you can use Edit->Copy although it may still be better to use Edit->Export Graphics to keep awareness of the settings and options.

Quote:
Will "copy" make a huge file if the wave is very large?


Yes. It would be helpful to know the number of data points you have in your 1D wave.

Assuming you have a large number of data points - 100,000 for example - to make the graphics smaller and faster you have two options:

1. Decimate your 1D wave before exporting using Analysis->Resample and export using a vector graphics format like EMF, EPS or PDF.

2. Export as a a bitmap graphic - I recommend the PNG format because it uses lossless compression. You can try 1x, 2x, 4x and 8x screen resolution to see which looks best.

Since a PNG graphic is a bitmap its size does not depend on how many data points you have. It does depend on how big the exported graph, the resolution you use and how well it compresses.

Quote:
Will the file size reduce if using export instead?


No. Edit->Copy does the same as Edit->Export Graphics. It is just a convenient shortcut.

November 10, 2012 at 09:56 am - Permalink

Lastly I used the screen resolution for the JPG and now the attached Word files size is just 1M. The data is size in my case is huge. I think it is more than 40M.

November 15, 2012 at 07:49 pm - Permalink

Quote:
Lastly I used the screen resolution for the JPG


JPEG uses lossy compression which may degrade the quality of the graphic. In general it is not a good format for publication-quality graphics.

If you are satisfied with the quality of JPEG then fine but you also might try PNG which uses lossless compression.

November 15, 2012 at 08:14 pm - Permalink