Like Nick_th_Fury, I have been fooling around, trying to lower the file size of the inserts as best I can.
I have YET to emulate this with Freeware but I'm sure it's possible (GIMP is really powerful).
Nick pointed out, vector art is very small file wise. .pdf files will completely preserve the file integrity, print size, color and....will not rasterize vector images.
If you look at an insert less than half of it has to be bitmap art; Screenshots, Most logos and scanned art.
The rest of it; flavor text, the actual neo layout scheme, black background, the neo logo, bars, meg information and what not, these can be done as vector elements (I already have a vector based Neo Geo logo that I've been using for T-Shirts that would work just fine).
So based off of some mental calculations...we could trim between 25% - 75% of the file size depending on the layout.
That coupled with the fact that a .pdf is a self compressed format, it could work.
But there is the caveat that we'd have to find a way for the designers who don't have Photoshop and Illustrator to do this as well.
I have YET to emulate this with Freeware but I'm sure it's possible (GIMP is really powerful).
Nick pointed out, vector art is very small file wise. .pdf files will completely preserve the file integrity, print size, color and....will not rasterize vector images.
If you look at an insert less than half of it has to be bitmap art; Screenshots, Most logos and scanned art.
The rest of it; flavor text, the actual neo layout scheme, black background, the neo logo, bars, meg information and what not, these can be done as vector elements (I already have a vector based Neo Geo logo that I've been using for T-Shirts that would work just fine).
So based off of some mental calculations...we could trim between 25% - 75% of the file size depending on the layout.
That coupled with the fact that a .pdf is a self compressed format, it could work.
But there is the caveat that we'd have to find a way for the designers who don't have Photoshop and Illustrator to do this as well.