Newsfeed
How can I make PROTECTed files smaller?
Protect converts everything on your slides to PNG images. This prevents anyone from editing them or copying text or other content, but it also means larger presentations in most cases.
There are several ways of controlling the size of the presentations Protect creates:
JPGs instead of PNGs
You can force Protect to use JPG images instead of PNGs, and you can set the degree of JPG compression it uses. This can result in much smaller file sizes.
Use Notepad to open the PPTools.INI file in your PPTools folder.
See How do I edit the Protect configuration file (PPTools.INI)? to learn how to do this.
Locate the line that reads: [Protect] and add two lines directly after. It should look like this:
[Protect]
; Set the file format: JPG or PNG
FileFormat=JPG
; Set JPG compression: 1 to 100
; 100 = best quality but largest files
JPGCompressionLevel=80
Do not add any blank lines or remove any existing lines from the file.
FileFormat=JPG tells Protect to use JPG images instead of its default PNG images.
JPGCompressionLevel sets the amount of compression on a scale from 1 to 100. We suggest 80 here, but you can experiment with different numbers.
Higher numbers give higher quality but larger images.
Lower numbers give lower quality but smaller images.
The default JPGCompressionLevel is 90 (that's what you'll get if the FileFormat is JPG but no JPGCompressionLevel is specified). You'll need to do a little experimenting to determine the best level for your presentation. Shows with lots of small text, will require a higher number than shows with just photo-type images.
Change the Resample setting
In order to work around bugs in some versions of PowerPoint, Protect normally exports images at higher resolution than needed and resamples down to your requested resolution. This makes the images, particularly the text, look much better than it normally would.
However, it means that the images are less compressible, which in turn makes your final PROTECTed PPT file larger. If you want the smallest possible files and can live with sometimes-jaggy text, add this to the [Protect] section of PPTools.INI:
[Previous] [Home] [Next]
; Optionally disable resampling
Resample=NO