I can’t believe it, but Stanford is already telling me to get ready for my five-year college reunion this fall. Five years–that’s as long as I was in college (including my Master’s degree) but this five years sure went by a lot faster than the previous five! Then again, I just passed my five-year anniversary at Plaxo (the math is a bit funny because I started working at Plaxo before I finished my MS, which btw is not advisable for one’s sanity).
Anyway as part of the reunion they asked everyone to make a page for a “class book” that they’ll be distributing. It’s a one-pager where you share some of you Stanford memories and give an update on your life since graduating. I think they expected most people to draw their class book page by hand and snail-mail it in or use their web-based pseudo-WYSIWIG editor, but I wanted a bit more control. So I downloaded the template PDF and opened it in Adobe Illustrator, which converted it to line-art (wow–product compatibility, who knew?!). Then I was able to add the type and graphics in Illustrator and save the final copy back out to a PDF.
For me, life since Stanford meant three things: doing NLP research (this is the reunion for my undergrad class), working at Plaxo, and getting married. As scary as it is to consider that five years have gone by already, when I actually stop to think of all the wonderful things that have happened since then, I consider myself extremely fortunate. I couldn’t be happier. In fact, I could really use another five years like this one!
One quick technical note: Since I embedded lots of photos in my class book page at their original resolution (I just scaled them down in Illustrator so they would still print at high quality), the file ended up being almost 200MB. When I first exported it as a PDF, I kept all the default options, including “preserve Illustrator editing capabilities” and the resulting PDF was 140MB. Clearly I could not e-mail this to Stanford nor post it on my web site. So I tried again, unchecked the Illustrator option, and also went into the compression settings and told it to use JPEG for the color images (which of course the originals were, but the default PDF option is to use 8-bit ZIP). This made a huge difference and the PDF was only 3MB but still high resolution. I also tried the compression option “Average downsampling at 300 dpi” for color images, but that essentially took out all the resolution in the images, so as soon as you magnified the document at all, they were very pixelated (looked more like 72 dpi to me). Apparently just telling it to use JPEG with the original images is plenty.
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