Blake_S

If its for web, use sRGB. Here is an example of what can happen with AdobeRGB: https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/adobe-rgb.htm For print it depends, you should ask the place where you will be printing.

What do you mean by "can handle it"? If its a printer with 4 inks for example, it will not print anything outside of CMYK space, which is less than sRGB, and way less than Adobe RGB. Like if there is a toxic green color, its impossible to print that.

When replacing an existing PDF, a new PDF is always placed incorrectly - AP always scales it, and I need to manually get it back to display at 100%. How to avoid that? I need to always display the PDF unscaled. Image frame doesn't seem to have a setting for that - it has "Scale to max fit", "Scale to min fit", "Stretch" and "None" You'd think that "None" would be the setting needed - but nope, it doesn't seem to do anything, it doesn't cancel out the existing scaling. I need to drag the scaling slider back to 100% for the PDF to display correctly. This is fine if you ahve maybe 1-2 files, this is not fine when you have a 100 or more on the page (printing small stickers) Don't remember about InDesign, but Illustrator has an option "Preserve: File Dimensions" on a linked file, and even when you replace the linked file, this option ensures that a new file is displayed without any scaling. Another problem is that "Reset rotation" option also doesn't work, it doesn't cancel out the rotation. Maybe it works for images, but doesn't work for PDFs.

Here is a link with 2 different PDFs for the test: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xT5cROKJ6Tvh7Ae0XLtKySC-C66eM1-Y/view?usp=sharing Note - you must set the "Passthrough" mode for the PDF. In "Interpret" mode the files are printed incorrectly, its pretty much impossible to use since it doesn't respect embedded fonts and replaces them if you don't have them installed on your system.

Because you tried it with a PDF which has nothing in it, not an actual production file. So your results are not reflective of anything. I can give you some actual PDFs to check.

I also tried re-printing the placed PDF to see if reducing its size would change anything. A PDF file which is placed on the master page was initially 1970 KB in size, after re-printing via Acrobat it became 570 KB That did not result in any noticeable changes, 38GB written to disc by AP on data merge.

Well that's a different setting. It won't affect the data merge. Unless there is no time to do that. And quite often out clients will be middlemen, so they would need to ask their client to fix the files. At which point if asked repeatedly they might just decide to find another printing house that won't bother them to re-make the files every time. And they would be right, since the PDF files they sent are correctly made. Its AP which places them incorrectly via data merge.

On Windows its the same, PersonaBackstore.dat is deleted on close. If you don't close AP however, it keeps all info, so after 3-4 data merge jobs it will be over 100 GB. And while this solves running out of free disc space issue, it still wears down SSD for no reason. Also about master pages - I deleted the master page, placed static linked PDF directly on the 2 pages, and added 1 data merge text field on each page. Result - 33GB written to disk on data merge. With a master page it was 35GB. So it makes pretty much no difference whether a master page is used or not. It seems like AP is extremely bad at processing external PDFs.

Modern SSDs can handle a ton of writes, but I imagine over several years AP will kill your SSD if you do a lot of data merge jobs. The issue is not the slightly larger PDF that its supposed to be, the issue is AP writing several dozens of GB of data into PersonaBackstore.dat to make a < 10 MB file, which as I already mentioned results in AP writing 10000 times more data to disc than it should have

I just now ran another data merge job, with a different PDF. PDF file weighs 2MB, placed on the master page, and that master page applied to 2 pages. Then there are several text frames linked to data merge fields, and that's it. In total there are 300 records. Result - 35 GB written to disk on data merge. This is quite ridiculous. Meanwhile, when I export the merged document as PDF, the resulting file with 600 pages is 3.5 MB, this means AP had written ten thousand times more data to disc than what it was supposed to.

Yes, and it doesn't work well. There are a bunch of styles, and I have no idea which style the wrong text ends up with, and thus no idea which style to search. It doesn't necessarily end up with "No Style" And there is an even worse situation - the wrong style may be same style which is correct for other text frames. In that case I get like 100+ results, only 1-2 of which are wrong, and the rest are correct. Which is mostly useless.

Well this does indeed show how to update the style, but I probably didn't specify my issue more clearly. Process shown above assumes all the text is already of the same style from the start. My issue is when this is not the case - suppose somewhere I accidentally used Paste instead of Paste Without Format. This makes the process above not work on that page, since it got its style overridden. So when you update the style, it won't affect that page. I wanted to know if its possible to correct this globally by just overriding the style on all text frames at once. And so far no one listed any method to do so, unless those frames are linked, in which case its simple. So more specific problem is overriding the styles, not just updating.

Even without the merge files I can reproduce this issue 100% of the time - I removed the folder with them and did a merge anyway, and the same thing happened. So the issue is definitely not with the merge files, its with the PDF on the master page. Sent the merge files just now. I also removed a PDF from the master page but left all the variable data and did a merge with that - this time memory usage got up to 6GB but not more, and nothing was written to disc. This proves that PDF causes the issue.

Yeah this will work then. Also, is there a function that allows to restore a text frame that is from a master page to its original state? Basically revert all page-specific changes on it, to get back its styles from a master page for example.

In this particular case this is correct - the specific frame should have one paragraph style on the entire frame, on all pages.

The frames I ran into this problem with are unlinked. They all have text which is designated for a specific page. The problem is when I paste the text into them, the correct style they had before changes - any way to prevent this?

Nothing changed after embedding the pdf. AP consumes all free RAM and starts writing to disc at 220MB/s speed. This times it wrote 23GB

This needs to be done before the data merge. It is the difference between changing a setting once vs changing it a 1000, or 10000, or whatever number of times. Suppose I have a thousand PDF files for data merge. However, now I need to remove a Trim Box from all of them in order for AP data merge to not crop them incorrectly - I don't know any automated way to do that, so now AP can't be used for this task.

No, I need the bleed area to be shown, since its for printing. In fact, this is a constant headache for a printing house - clients sending files without a bleed area. Without it, I can't print the resulting document, it can't be cut if everything outside of trim box is not printed.

Sent the files. I tried to package it, but AP failed to do it correctly - resulting file instead of a linked PDF on a master page has just an image frame with an extremely low res raster of said PDF. You would need to delete that image frame and place the PDF itself on the master page.

If you attempt to data merge PDF files into an Image frame, it doesn't work correctly if PDF has a trim box defined - all content outside of the Trim Box gets cut. Just to clear things up - Crop Box is used to define which areas of the PDF are cut out. Trim Box defines the cut area for the physical blade cutting, after the document was printed. The content between Trim Box and Crop Box, the bleed area, is supposed to be shown and printed. However, AP cuts all the bleed area out, making it impossible to place a PDFs via Data Merge correctly without altering all of them. Currently I have to delete trim box entirely for data merge to place PDFs correctly, but this shouldn't be required.

but my whole point is how AP manages to run out of memory, take 1+ minute and write 30GB to disk to make a 3.5MB file. If I need to change something and re-run the merge, it writes another 30GB.

I have a pdf file with 1 page with the size of 62 KB I create a new AP document, place (link) that PDF on a master page, then create 2 pages with the master, and on each of them place a single text frame, populate it with 2 fields from data source file, then place a single picture frame, and also link it to a data merge field. Images are QR codes in PNG format around 700-800 bytes each. That's it, nothing else is there. You'd think it would be very fast to merge this right? Wrong. When I create a data merged document for 300 records, AP immediately runs out of memory (consuming 10GB RAM) and starts writing to disk. It writes over 30 GB to PersonaBackstore.dat file. And it take more than a minute to make the merged document. Meanwhile, when I save the merged afpub document, its size is 3.5 MB When I export the merged file as PDF with 300DPI, its total size is 11 MB What's going on, and how is this even possible? There is clearly something wrong here.

pasting the text seems to override whatever style you set in a master page initially

I did that. Exact steps to reproduce: set text frame on a master page, enter some placeholder text, apply the style you need the text apply master page to page 1, on the page paste the text you need - this changes the text style to something else for some reason try to set the correct style back on all pages at once by selecting placeholder text on master frame and changing its style - this does nothing