OK, so it is New Years Day and I am relaxing (?) by going back through some of the old stuff on my hard disk and, realising that PageMaker is truly history, I am opening old PM docs in InD and then saving them as InD docs so I have more chance of opening them again in the future. Did I mention that I have a love for historical documents?
A couple of things intrigue my holiday brain in laziness mode . . .
Firstly, why does a single layer PageMaker document insist on opening in InDesign as a two-layer document with all of the pages’ content on the upper of those two layers (labelled “Default”) instead of the lower layer (labelled “Master Default” instead of the more usual “Layer 1”)? I have gone through each document, page by page, selected all (Command-A) and dragged the little dot in the Layers palette down to the lower layer. I have then deleted the upper layer so as to limit the file size of the document.
And that brings me to the second intriguing thing. Why does the size of the document increase so much when it is converted to InDesign? I mean, it is not up a few percentage points but a huge increase. The document I have just completed — a single page document with just two graphics and a very small amount of text — weighed in as 148k as a PM doc. Now, as an InD doc, it weighs a whopping 1.3MB. Where has all that come from? I’m not good at mathematics, but I think that is a 543% increase.
I am well aware that, when I used PageMaker, my biggest hard drive was probably about 500MB whereas my current internal HD is a terrabyte (external drives easily double that). So hard disk space is no longer such a primary concern. But it does seem to me somewhat profligate of Adobe to be squandering so much of their customers’ available storage space.
Alright, I feel better now that I have had a moan (or, as we say here, a whinge) but I would like to know if there is an answer to either of these questions and, if so, what those answers are.
.
