Smaller Output

[awells12]

We are in the process of implementing our HTML5 output into our company's application. Our output is currently 56 MB, which would significantly increase the size of the total application (around 300 MB currently). We have been asked to find ways to downsize our output and one suggestion was to convert our JPGs and PNGs to GIFs. Is there an easy way to do that in Flare? Does anyone have any other suggestions for how we can get our output to a more manageable size?

Thanks in advance.

[SteveS]

I don't know if converting jpgs or pngs to gif will be overly successful. Gifs work best with flat images with few colours and 'complex' images can tend to look pixelated.

You might be able to reduce the quality of the jpgs or pngs. Again, caution must be used to make sure the image does not become pixelated, particularly on the borders to objects in the image. Some graphics packages allow batch processing to complete this on all images selected.

Another thing to check is image size. Make sure you haven't got large images that are resized to make them smaller. If the image is resized by 50% the original fall is 400% too big!

Make sure your output does not include unnecessary files, there is a parallel topic about this running at the moment.

I can remember when a whole website would fit on a floppy disk (1.44MB)...

HTH

[Robotman]

Check your Partial Word Search settings as well (Performance tab of the HTML5 target). Having this set increases the size of the help.

[NorthEast]

We are in the process of implementing our HTML5 output into our company's application. Our output is currently 56 MB, which would significantly increase the size of the total application (around 300 MB currently). We have been asked to find ways to downsize our output and one suggestion was to convert our JPGs and PNGs to GIFs. Is there an easy way to do that in Flare? Does anyone have any other suggestions for how we can get our output to a more manageable size?

Thanks in advance.

Is there a technical reason why you need to reduce the size of the output?
Just 300MB for an application is not very large by modern standards. For example, the HTML5 help alone for one of our products is 700MB.

For the image formats, I definitely wouldn't recommend moving to GIFs. There's probably little size reduction, since JPGs and PNGs are already compressed, plus GIF is a very old format and limited to 256 colours. I'd stick with PNG and JPG - generally, JPGs tend to work better with photographs, and PNGs work best when you have areas of solid colour (like screenshots).

Also, if you want to reduce the size of the application installer, can you host the help online instead?
Then your users will only have to download the amount of help they actually use - which for our products is a very small proportion of the total help.

[awells12]

Reducing the size of the output was just something suggested to me by the developers, I think because they don't think that much of the application should be just for the help file (I agree, 56 MB isn't that much). I'll try the suggestions made in this thread, but the developers might just have to deal with it .

[SteveS]

Reducing the size of the output was just something suggested to me by the developers, I think because they don't think that much of the application should be just for the help file (I agree, 56 MB isn't that much). I'll try the suggestions made in this thread, but the developers might just have to deal with it .

Ah. They want more room for bloatware...