I'm running the latest version of LR Classic on a Windows 10 machine. I've copied some very old yearbooks using a camera and copy stand, and have just about finished descreening, spotting and otherwise processing the files in LR and Photoshop. I need to produce digital versions that can be used for making prints of individual pages, and for display on computers, tablets and cellphones.
Part of my solution is to produce PDF's with a picture of each page of the yearbook on a page of the PDF. In the process I have tried Win10's routine of printing to PDF, and also Lightroom's Print Module's Print to PDF. My first go-round is a yearbook with about 55 pages in all, each tif file being 2250x3300 pixels at 300 ppi, roughly 8.4MP each in size wi sRGB as the color space.
Using the Win10 procedure I had no choice as to final file sizes or resolution. The procedure converted the files to 600x600 pixels, and the resultant PDF is 48.8 MB.
Using LR's Print routine I was able to choose the resolution in dpi, but no choices on the other parameters. Using 300 dpi, the resultant PDF was 22.9 MB in size. Using 72 dpi, the file size came to 3 MB, with rather poor quality as viewed on my computer.
My questions: 1) Should I consider LR's "dpi" to be equivalent to "ppi?" If not, what are the pixel resolutions and dimensions of the individual files captured within the PDF?
2) I was surprised to see that using the WIN10 Print to PDF routine produced the largest PDF file size by far. What parameters are used by WIN10 compared to those in the LR Print to PDF routine?
3) Would I be better off starting with jpegs rather than the tif's? and what pixel dimensions and resolutions?
4) Is there any way to have more control in either the Win10 direct procedure, and in the LR procedure?
5) Finally, is there a better approach entirely, other than Print to PDF? I do not have MSWord or PowerPoint, although I do have Open Office. I also can produce a manually controlled slide show in ProShow Producer as an EXE file only, but that can't be run on Mac machines. My goal is to produce however many file types and formats as needed, and put the results on thumbdrives to distribut to several people in the community that produced the yearbooks.