Ron, KC4YOY wrote:
Here's the same image after some tinkering....50k file size instead of

298k and it looks better to me.

http://www.sparkbench.com/CBtext1revised.gif



Bill, explain to me what you did to get it so small.
I'm sure I'll need to do again for some future page.
I have some Clough-Brengle catalog pages that
I'd like to put on, but the scans are more than 2 meg.
and still are hard to read the small text.

Thanks,

Ron

I resized it to 500 pixels wide - it was 1083 wide so that alone reduced
the file size to about 25% of original. No point in having a 1083 pixel
wide image that has to scrunch into the box provided on the page. That
causes it to compress and may look 'funny' depending on a guys browser,
video card, monitor, etc. At 500 pixels maybe it still compresses (or
expands) a little bit. I can't tell from the script what the size of
the rectangle is supposed to be but on my browser it appears to be about
500 wide.

Next I took it down from 8-bit/256 colors to 4-bit/16 colors. As
mentioned before, thats a no brainer for a black and white image. That
reduces the file size even further. Then just for looks I changed some
of the 'almost' white or 'almost' black pixels to true black and white
leaving the greys in the middle of the range.

For your 2 MB scans try something along the same lines. If they are 2MB
it sounds as if they were scanned as color??. Get them into black and
white for starters and gradually step down to 256 and then to 16 color
black and white and see how they look. Old yellowed pages are sometime
difficult to handle but there's ways.
After you get it looking good, resize it down to whatever width is
appropriate for the page. If there's a lot of fine print you might not
be able to get it as small as you'd like. The alternative here is to
put a reduced size clickable link on the main page that can carry an
interested surfer to a full size version. That way the main info page
doesn't get bogged down.
Crop the edges appropriately. You can often knock off a bunch of the
file size just with simple cropping.
And if its a fine text page, don't try to put it in a box like the
letter on the home page because thats gonna really scrunch down the fine
print.

Hope this helps, drop me an email if you'd like to discuss it further.

-Bill
exray at coqui dot net