Alchemist42

I've been working toward moving an old PagePlus project to Affinity Publisher... I had put off doing it as they had no PagePlus import and the PDF import leaves a lot to be desired if you had a clean PP layout you wanted preserved instead of the hodge podge layout created from a imported PDF. But figured it would give me a good opportunity to rework the document for better grammar / readability... only to find there isn't a grammar checker (and barely a spell checker) in affinity publisher. So once again I find myself putting of actually 'using' affinity designer... and I'll be porting my older page plus document into Page Plus x9 which doesn't make such huge PDFs... and had a grammar checker. I really like affinity publisher... I just wish I could use it in my projects... but every time I pick it up to actually do something real with it... it falls short. I own Designer, Publisher and Photo... and the only one I've used for anything real is Photo. I plan to use designer in publisher documents so until I can actually use publisher in production only one of the three (photo) is useful to me... and I'm guessing the features I need will be in a paid upgrade which made my initial purchases just funding the ongoing development of a tool I hope to use one day. I hate being so negative... but its annoying.

Yep... makes perfect sense... I looked for a bw/1bit color option in the export but only rgb/cmyk options... PagePlus handles this better... and this is likely a bigger deal breaker for it seeing actual use than I thought... I do a lot of publications with one bit line art... and they will all balloon in publisher. Definitely something the need to address before I can think about retiring Page Plus as my daily DTP solution.

Well in my case... I had a 130 page document with nothing but scanned images... so no fonts needed... I change the setting to embed 'no fonts' and it resulted in just as large a file as when fonts were included with partials. It sounds like there is a problem with some fonts being converted to curves too but that doesn't seem to be why my PDFs are huge.

Just in case Fonts were the issue... I tried exporting a PDF with NO FONTS embedded.... as the document was all images anyway. No change in file size.

I've had similar issues with HUGE PDF sizes... I have a 130 page scanned PDF I needed to make a change too... the starting file was 32mb... the PDF is just images no OCR so no fonts... just 130 pages of b/w page images. Loading the document in publisher and saving it results in a 320mb publisher file... exporting the file back to PDF results in a 400mb PDF. If I do this same thing in the latest version of Page Plus the final PDF is 39mb. Larger but not crazy larger. The majority of the images are at 400dpi... I can get a smaller PDF if I use the web profile but at 72 dpi it looks like garbage. So my solution so far is... don't use Publisher, keep using Page Plus.

GaryLearnTech, That's excellent... I hadn't tried it with JPG, etc... only with PDF. JPG works most of the time for my usage. I do card game layouts and need to export individual cards to Image files for the printer. As long as I have one image file per page auto export for JPG, PNG, etc. I'm good to go. Individual PDF page export would be handy at times but not a daily workflow issue. I do have another PDF export issue that's driving me nuts though. I have a 130 page scanned PDF... the pages are image files... The software it was created in generated about a 30gb file. If I load it into Publisher and export out a PDF before making any changes (or after making any changes) the resulting file is over 400mb in size. If I export the pages as separate JPG images they are about 2mb each with a few later pages... The document is B/W but the images are rgb8 and I can't see any options anywhere to drop it down to a 2 bit image. If I do the same thing in Page Plus it generates a 40mb PDF... so a little bigger but not order of magnitude bigger.

Lets say I have a multi-page document... that I need to export EACH PAGE as a SEPARATE PDF, JPG, etc. or whatever export format. As far as I can tell I can do this by... manually exporting Page1, then Page 2, then Page 3, then Page 4. It would be extremely handy to have a check box for 'separate file for each page'... pick 'all pages' or a 'page range' and have it automatically generate mydocument1.pdf, mydocument2.pdf, mydocument3.pdf... where the number is the page number being exported. The companies I print through require a separate file for each page... if you have a 100 page document its tedious to do 100 exports.

I have InDesign and PagePlus… use them both often... I do a lot of database driven indesign document generation via IDML. Its an open and fairly easy to navigate format for development. I much prefer PagePlus for my own projects though... its print ready PDF support as always fit my needs quite well and its done the job for years. I likely have 100s for documents in Page Plus and know the app well. After having brought in several PDF documents for editing in Publisher I wouldn't say its PDF import is any better than Page Plus... and I wouldn't want to depend on it for bringing in my current InDesign or PagePlus documents. As a software developer I understand the clean break in format in moving to Publisher as its age was likely limiting things quite a bit... That said... Publishers primary markets are InDesign users and Page Plus users... If they want to get InDesign folks to move Publisher they need to support IDML at a minimum... and if they want page plus users to migrate they need a good page plus import. No one is better equipped to make a pageplus import than serif... they own both formats. IDML is open and fairly straightforward to work with as well. No reason IMO serif shouldn't be addressing both of these. I think they are putting to much faith/credit in their PDF import.

I'm a long time fan of Page Plus and have used it on dozens of projects. I also work with InDesign / IDML in my development work... I've been looking forward to Publisher for a while so snapped it up upon release. But so far everything I've started on it... I've ended up stuck... Lets take a simple PDF cleanup... I had a PDF that someone tacked on a cover page using some software so it was several times larger than the other pages... so I just wanted to load the PDF, fix that page size and save it again. In Publisher I loaded the 32mb document... couldn't find a setting in page properties for the first page to reset it to letter... so ended up duplicating page 2, copying and resizing the page 1 image on the new page... then deleting the original page. Clumsy but it works... Then I saved the document as a publisher file... 320mb. (10 times the size of the original PDF) then I exported it to a PDF and the result was a 400mb PDF file. 32mb to 400mb. Next I did the same thing in PagePlus… loaded the document, went to the page properties on page one and reset it to 'letter' 8.5x11... resized the image and saved the exported the document to PDF... it resulted in a 40mb PDF file... still bigger but not excessively larger. Next I experimented with recreating a project I had been working on in PagePlus since Publisher can't and wont load Page Plus Documents... that project uses some of the pageplus smart objects as 'counters'... but all the smart objects in Publisher start at 3 or more sides... so useless as a count indicator... so that project will have to stay in page plus. So pretty much... while I think publisher looks really cool and I hope to see great things from it... for me, at least so far its the equivalent of a lawn ornament... that really great looking muscle car that sits in front of your house because it doesn't run.

IDML files are straight forward... I've written apps that parse them for embedded scripts and hit databases to generate content on the fly. IDML is essentially a renamed ZIP container with a hierarchical folder tree of xml documents. Hopefully they can support an IDML import... that should be straight forward at least for features AP supports.

Lets say I start with a 30mb 130 page PDF that consists of mostly B/W images... a scanned document PDF. I import this 30mb file into AP and it results in a 330mb Affinity publisher file... then if I export it back out to PDF at the same resolution it generates a 400mb PDF file. So with zero changes just and import/export the document grows to over 10 times its original size. I've ben unable to find any settings in AF to reduce this. Its not terribly useful as is and largely prevents me from updating my existing document base to AF. Note: Since I have an extensive document base in PagePlus and currently PDF export/import is the only way to import PagePlus documents into AF this is a real problem for me.

I've found the quick dial in PP handy in a lot of situations but have found no equivalent in AP... alternatively or in addition to.. make more smart shapes go down to 1 side/facet/cog etc so the shape can be used as a counter icon. The quickdial supported 1 or more segments... most smart shapes in AF start at 3.