Creating articles for other organizations

[chuckleberry]

Our current newsletter is over 11MB, too large to attach, so as Executive Secretary I am attempting to add the Bishopric Message. My name is published as the author rather than allowing to insert/edit the member of the bishopric or ward member who writes an article. Suggestions?

[aebrown]

The simplest approach is to have the real author create the first draft of the newsletter article. It can be little more than a title and a default category. But that will attach his name to the article as the author.

Then you can edit the article and do all the work of creating the content.

[chuckleberry]

That is an awkward approach for the ward newletter specialist, who recieves articles from many organizations. So, she will continue to create a PDF with nice formatting and pictures, then email it as an attachment to the ward members... Too bad this cannot be posted to Newsletters, but it is too large. One drawback is that such a large file is too large an attachment for some of our members' email accounts... Oh, well.

[aebrown]

That is an awkward approach for the ward newletter specialist, who recieves articles from many organizations. So, she will continue to create a PDF with nice formatting and pictures, then email it as an attachment to the ward members... Too bad this cannot be posted to Newsletters, but it is too large. One drawback is that such a large file is too large an attachment for some of our members' email accounts... Oh, well.

Another workaround (also awkward, but doable) we have used for large PDFs is to break them up into smaller chunks. You can attach as many files as you want to a single Newsletter article; it's just that each attachment can't be too big.

[russellhltn]

Another workaround (also awkward, but doable) we have used for large PDFs is to break them up into smaller chunks. You can attach as many files as you want to a single Newsletter article; it's just that each attachment can't be too big.

At 11MB, I'm sure it's all the photos that's doing it.

[chuckleberry]

Thanks for help. An update request would be:
1. Allow the creator to select the author from a list of ward members
2. Allow to edit the date format to include the day of the month or not. For example, I would prefer the monthly bishopric message to merely be listed as "October 2012" rather than "7 October 2012".

[mevans]

Our current newsletter is over 11MB, too large to attach

Have you tried a PDF compression tool or tweaking the settings used to generate your PDFs? I don't know what you're using to create your newsletter, but you might be able to make some improvements. Some tools may allow you to tune your PDF for the appropriate use. For example, if you set up PDF creation for on-screen viewing, you might get a lot smaller file. The defaults for your PDF might be preserving resolution required for high-resolution printing, such as digital presses, etc.

[chuckleberry]

Thanks for the suggestions. I did not create the newsletter of the PDF, so I don't know the compression that was used. It is 10 pages (one for each organization or subject), so I viewed each as a single page, did a screen capture of that page and created an MS Word document for each page... around 590K each instead of 11MB (the Primary section was 3.5MB because of a large picture). I then saved the Word docs as PDFs and imported them to each article after taking the text from those articles that had "live" text instead of just graphics, so the members can read the article text plain or view the attached PDF.
The wierd thing was in attaching the files is that it would usually take about 5 to 10 tries for each of them to attach, because the attachment would alsways get an error message. I tried changing margins in Word, importing Word docs, importing PFDs, and nothing would help, but keeping at it, it would finally work after many attempts... very frustrating.