Large documents containing many images

Hello all,

I would like some feedback on Word 2000 image management capabilities.
I work in a company which produces large reports with many images (up
to 800 pictures - 500 pages). Currently these images are being scanned
and inserted at 400x300 pixels, which kills all the finer details which
the image might depict.

I am looking forward to bring up the quality of the images being
inserted. Here are the steps I am considering:

1. Scan/acquire JPEG formatted images at 1280x1024 res. Estimated
increase on file size will jump form 40K to 200-400K.

2. Link and not embed/insert images, so image size will not kill the
network or the workstations. (most of them have a hefty Gig of RAM, but
the network tends to choke on files with more than 50 MB, besides, not
all workstations have such capacity in our network).

3. Final reports will be printed directly from Word. Electronic file
delivery will be done through Acrobat (PDF) in order to avoid
delivering zipped or multiple files. Word delivery might be considered,
but I fear if the user will be able to visualize the pictures.

4. I am a bit concerned with offline backup and restore. Ideally, the
whole directory (word file and image subdirectory) would be taken
offline to a tape, but it is impossible to foresee where will it be
restored. Will Word attempt to look for the linked images using the
full route or only a relative route? Will Word be able to find anything
if the whole directory is restored in a different route?

Any comments on the individual steps? Any foreseeable problems with
this approach?