Book page miniatures best practices

[Tim Nikischin]

I am creating a photo book and would love to create an overview of all pages of the book with a little description to each spread (year + location of the picture) at the end of my book.

I was thinking about simply embed/link the Affinity Publisher document with itself. However, as this might work out at the first try, this does not work out if you do this for several pages of the same document and need to update some pages. With each time I safe the document Publisher asks to refresh the changed resources (as I save my document it's detected as changed resource which is correct so far). However if I do so, it somehow explodes the file size of the document. With every time it saves it doubles the size of the document.

Example:

Document saved: Document with document implemented. -> Size 100MB

Refreshed embedded document and saved: Results in Document with document with document implemented implemented. -> size 200MB

Refreshed embedded document for the second time and saved: Results in Document with document with document with document implemented implemented implemented. -> size 400MB

... I did this few times which resulted in multi GB files unfortunately.

So not refreshing the implemented document is somehow a solution to the problem as the file size keeps small but I will need to go through this point not only once refreshing the embedded document whenever I make some changes to the book.

My idea was do create a copy of the book without this last pages included. In my main document I will only embed  this copy which will still result in large file sizes (as I have to do this for every spreadsheet) but will at  least not grow exponentially. However, whenever I have updated my main document I will need to create a copy, remove the last pages and replace my linked copy with this new copy which means an amount of manual actions to do.

 

Does any of you have a better idea how to create an overview with all page miniatures without blowing the file size or having a lot of manual effort? Something like export each single page or create screenshots is not an option.

Thank you very much in advance!

[Pšenda]

13 hours ago, Tim Nikischin said:

Results in Document with document with document implemented implemented.

??? 😵

You use "embedded"? It insert full content embedded file into main document. Therefore every content update double size.

Try linked.

[Tim Nikischin]

4 hours ago, Pšenda said:

You use "embedded"? It insert full content embedded file into main document. Therefore every content update double size.

I think I did. Just wanted to reproduce this behavior and created a demo file for it. While using linking, it works well. Also experienced this behavior before upgrading to 1.8, maybe this fixed it as well.

Except for the fact when I save the document and not change it afterwards it still asks me to save even though nothing changed (but the linked document is detected as changed). But this is ok, I can live with that!

Thank you very much. I think one of the documents links was still an embedd in the old document.

 

Funny side fact I noticed:

When I add an image to the document the document size grows by about 0,3 MB for a linked image with 8,8 MB displayed at full size. 

When this spread with the image is not included in the summary page the document has about 0,8 MB

When I change linked document pages to include the spread with the picture, it becomes 1,4 MB after saving. 

Interesting to see, I will keep this in mind when creating my main document with all my images.

Edited April 7, 2020 by Tim Nikischin

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, Tim Nikischin said:

Except for the fact when I save the document and not change it afterwards it still asks me to save even though nothing changed (but the linked document is detected as changed).

I think that's the expected behavior. If a main file is saved, the "linked" file will be changed and prompted to update it. And over and over again :-)