Exporting pages as PNG or JPEG in Publish by Zaweba

Sometimes the thing you need is a picture, not a document. A poster for a club's social media page, a flyer to drop into a slideshow, a menu to put on a website, or a preview to send someone on their phone all work better as an image. Publish by Zaweba can export every page of a publication as a PNG or a JPEG.

Each page becomes its own picture file, at 96, 150 or 300 dpi, and you can include the bleed if you want it. Because Publish measures text from the fonts themselves, the words in the picture match what you saw on screen.

Choosing PNG or JPEG

PNG keeps every pixel exactly as it is. That makes it the better choice for pages with crisp text, flat colours, logos and sharp lines, such as a notice, a price list or a poster that's mostly type. It doesn't smudge the edges of letters, which matters when people will zoom in to read.

JPEG is better at photographs. It compresses them into smaller files, and on a photo-heavy page the saving is worthwhile. The trade-off is that very fine text and hard edges can pick up slight blurring around them. For a flyer built round a big photo, JPEG is usually the right call; for a page of small text, PNG is safer.

Picking the resolution

96 dpi gives a picture at roughly the size you see on a normal screen. It's ideal for quick previews, e-mails and anywhere the image will be seen small. 150 dpi gives more detail for social media posts and web pages, where people may view it larger or on sharp phone screens. 300 dpi is for printing, or for any time you need the extra detail, and it produces much larger files.

A sensible rule is to go no higher than you need. A 300 dpi picture of an A3 poster is a big file to upload for a post that will be shown a few inches across. Equally, a 96 dpi picture won't print well, so don't send one to a print shop.

With or without bleed

Bleed is the strip beyond the trimmed edge that a printer cuts away. Include it when the picture is going to someone who will print and trim it, so backgrounds and photos that run off the edge print right to the cut. Leave it off for anything seen on screen, where that extra strip would just look like a border that shouldn't be there.

Jobs it suits

A sale flyer shared as a post, a concert poster sent to a local listings page, a certificate shown on a slide at an awards evening, a menu added to a website gallery or a business card image for an e-mail signature all start as pages in Publish and finish as pictures. If a page will be edited later in an image editor, export at the highest resolution you might need so you're not working from a small copy.

Exporting only some pages saves time on longer documents. Export pictures accepts page ranges, so you can pick just the front page of a newsletter for a social media teaser instead of producing a file for every page.

A few cautions

A picture of a page is flat. The text can't be selected or searched, and hyperlinks don't work in it, so for anything people need to read carefully, click or print, a PDF is still the better choice. Keep the .ozp publication as the master and export fresh pictures whenever it changes, rather than editing the exported images.

Used alongside the print-ready and web PDFs, picture export rounds out the ways Publish by Zaweba can send a publication out into the world.