Master pages, file size, and memory

[Woody44]

I need some advice and guidance with respect to using master pages in TextMaker. First, some background:

Several years ago, the 12-year old daughter of a good friend wrote a charming little story about a young girl dragon who became a heroine. At Thanksgiving (the American holiday in late November) she gave me a copy of the manuscript because she knew that I write and self-publish books. The story was surprisingly good, considering her age, and her father and I conspired to format it into a book and publish it (under her name) through Amazon. We did so, she was appropriately gobsmacked to see her book in print, and it has actually sold a few copies.

At the time, I was using Microsoft Office 2016. Doing the book as a basic book, even with a custom page size, was easy enough. I originally wanted to decorate the corners of each page with a scroll resign, but that caused a lot of problems. The scrolls were images, which meant four images on every page. The file size exploded.

Worse, I wasn't able to make the images match up with the page margins and gutter margin settings. I constantly had the scroll images on right-hand pages with margins for left-hand pages, and vice-versa. In the end, I gave up, and we did the book without the artwork on the interior pages.

TextMaker offers master pages, like my old desktop publishing software from MS-DOS days. I have never worked with master pages in TextMaker. If two master pages (left-hand and right-hand) are set up in TextMaker, each with a scroll image in each of the four corners, does each page of the book add the size of four images to the resulting file size? Or do the master pages carry the images, and the individual book body pages only hold text?

I hope that's clear.

[Jossi]

I've made the test. A tmdx document with four corner graphics on the master page and one line of text has a size of 54 kB. The same document with 20 pages of text has 57 kB. So, obviously, the graphics on the master page is counted only once.

[Woody44]

Thank you, Sir.

That's what I was hoping to hear (read).

[Woody44]

Wow!

I just took a novel of twenty chapters, approximately 150 pages, and re-formatted it using a graphic image (JPEG) as a page border, placing the page border image (and nothing else) on master pages. I had some surprises.

First, inserting a page border doesn't automatically put the border on all master pages -- or on all right-hand master pages. It only works within one chapter. I have twenty chapters, so I had to create twenty chapter first pages, twenty chapter left-hand pages, and twenty chapter right-hand pages. It isn't rocket science, but it is tedious.

The resulting file size wasn't massively larger than the file size without borders. It was 394 KB without borders, and 425 KB with borders. Not bad at all. HOWEVER ...

Once I exported to PDF, things went south in a hurry. The PDF without borders is 953 KB, with fonts embedded. With borders, exported to PDF directly from TextMaker, the file size jumped to 3,231 KB. I tried using doPDF (a freeware virtual printer) to see if that would make a difference. In doPDF I also embedded fonts, and I selected their "Small file" option. The resulting file is 3,215 KB.

Unfortunately, it's the size of the PDF file that I'm most concerned with, because for print-on-demend publishing (such as Amazon KDP) the best results are obtained by uploading a PDF with embedded fonts rather than uploading a .docx file and trusting Amazon to do a proper conversion.

[Jossi]

Master pages are a chapter-based feature, because allowing only one set of master pages per document would reduce the design options enormously. However, when I insert a chapter break into a document, the new chapter inherits the chapter format from the first one, including first, left and right master pages. So instead of the tedious work to correct three master pages twenty times over, it would probably be easier to remove all chapter breaks (using Search & Replace), adjust the master pages according to your wishes and then re-insert the chapter breaks.

I can see no solution to the PDF size problem, as master pages are an exclusive feature of TextMaker. AFAIK the PDF specification doesn't include anything like master pages; so every PDF printer you try will copy the graphics on the master page to each single page of the PDF document.

[Woody44]

Master pages are a chapter-based feature, because allowing only one set of master pages per document would reduce the design options enormously. However, when I insert a chapter break into a document, the new chapter inherits the chapter format from the first one, including first, left and right master pages. So instead of the tedious work to correct three master pages twenty times over, it would probably be easier to remove all chapter breaks (using Search & Replace), adjust the master pages according to your wishes and then re-insert the chapter breaks.

I guessed that might be the case. Thanks for the confirmation.