Making a web PDF for e-mail in Publish by Zaweba

Not every PDF is heading to a print shop. A newsletter going out by e-mail, a menu for a website or a flyer shared in a group chat needs to be light and quick to open, and the full print-ready file is often far heavier than it needs to be. Publish by Zaweba has a second kind of PDF for exactly this: the web PDF.

It's the same publication, exported differently. The page is cut to trim size, so there's no bleed or crop marks around the edge, and the pictures are reduced to 150 dpi and saved as JPEG. The words stay as real text, so the file still reads crisply on any screen.

Why the file is smaller

Pictures are almost always what makes a PDF big. A print-ready export keeps them at full resolution, because a printer laying down ink on paper needs every pixel it can get. A screen doesn't. At 150 dpi a photo still looks sharp on a laptop or a phone, and saving it as JPEG squeezes it down further. On a picture-heavy newsletter the difference can be large, which is the gap between an attachment that sends in a moment and one that bounces back from a full inbox.

Dropping the bleed and crop marks matters too, though for a different reason. Those marks are for whoever trims the printed sheet. On a screen they're just clutter around the edge of the page, and a reader opening your flyer shouldn't have to look past them.

When to choose it

Use the web PDF for anything people will read on a screen: an e-mailed newsletter, a menu or price list on a website, an events programme for a club's social media, a notice sent to parents, or a copy of a poster for someone to look over before it goes to print. Use the print-ready PDF for anything going to a print shop or being printed properly, where bleed, crop marks and full-resolution pictures do matter.

Many jobs need both. A club newsletter might be printed for the noticeboard and e-mailed to members. Export each version from the same publication when it's finished, and name the files clearly so the heavy one goes to the printer and the light one goes in the e-mail. Something like newsletter-print and newsletter-web saves confusion later.

Getting the best result

Design for the page first and the format second. The web PDF doesn't change your layout, it only changes how the file is packaged, so a page that looks good printed will look good on screen. That said, keep a couple of screen readers in mind. Very small text that's fine on paper can be hard to read on a phone, and light grey text on white is harder on a screen in bright daylight.

If the file still seems heavy, the cause is usually a large number of pictures rather than their size. A newsletter with twenty photos will always be bigger than one with four, whatever their resolution. Cropping pictures inside their frames doesn't shrink the stored picture, so consider whether every photo earns its place.

Links survive. Hyperlinks added with Insert > Hyperlink are clickable in exported PDFs, which makes a web PDF much more useful than a picture of the page: readers can tap a web address or an e-mail address and go straight there.

Check before you send

Open the exported file before it goes anywhere. Publish can open it straight in PDF by Zaweba after exporting, or in your usual PDF reader, so you can scroll through, test a link or two and look at the pictures at normal size. A quick look catches the page you forgot to update or the photo that came out darker than you expected.

The web PDF is one of those small options that makes Publish by Zaweba practical for everyday sharing, not just for print. One publication, two files, each suited to where it's going.