Publisher - Book Management?

[Tovarich Pizann]

I am working with an extensive document that weighs in at 141 pages, with multiple images on each page. It works, but performance is quite a bit sluggish; this evening it took me more than 30 minutes to print 3 pages, just waiting for the computer to process the command. I have not had similar issues with smaller documents so I'm entirely certain the size of the document is what's at issue.

Adobe InDesign has a "book" feature, whereby you can keep several smaller documents (say, the various chapters of a book) and then a master "Book" document that simply contains references to the smaller documents. In this way you can work with reasonable subsections, but still have an easy way to create PDFs or print ready files of the entire project.

Does a similar tool exist in Publisher? I'm aware of the ability to append other documents, but the result of that operation is a single large document with all the pages, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

[thomaso]

Hi Tovarich Pizann,

Welcome to the Affinity forums!

141 pages don't seem to be much in APub. There is no such "book" feature in APub yet, as a substitute you can split an .afpub + work with sections but you don't get styles or master pages synchronized between the split documents.

Unfortunately you don't tell in which way your document is "extensive" and what size makes you assume to be the culprit for your experienced delay. Any filters, effects, adjustments applied? What resource file types? Embedded or linked? If linked: saved locally or on a network volume?

Are working with a color space above 8 bit, either with the .afpub or the images? Any resolution above ~ 300 dpi involved?
Do you experience the same when exporting the 3 pages into a PDF with default 'for print' preset?

[Andrew Crompton]

Hi, Tovarich

I experienced a similar problem working with a long document (nearly 200 pages, mostly text, about 20 b/w illustrations). In my case, it was not just the performance of AP that was slow: my entire PC almost came to a halt and I often had to wait 30 seconds for it to respond to anything.

I discovered that the PC was simply running out of useable memory: according to Windows Task Manger, memory usage would be over 90%, and most of it was being used by AP.

There is a setting in AP that enabled me to solve the problem: limit RAM usage (Edit > Preferences > Performance > RAM Usage Limit). I set this to 2048Mb - my pc has 8Gb in total. That sounds like not much memory to allocate but AP seems happy with it and performance is now quite ok. 

Maybe that will help in your case, too.

[Tovarich Pizann]

4 hours ago, Andrew Crompton said:

I discovered that the PC was simply running out of useable memory: according to Windows Task Manger, memory usage would be over 90%, and most of it was being used by AP.

I suspect something similar is the case. I am actually using a Mac, however, and I’m not aware of an equivalent setting to what you’re describing for Windows.

[Tovarich Pizann]

7 hours ago, Andrew Crompton said:

Hi, Tovarich

I experienced a similar problem working with a long document (nearly 200 pages, mostly text, about 20 b/w illustrations). In my case, it was not just the performance of AP that was slow: my entire PC almost came to a halt and I often had to wait 30 seconds for it to respond to anything.

I discovered that the PC was simply running out of useable memory: according to Windows Task Manger, memory usage would be over 90%, and most of it was being used by AP.

There is a setting in AP that enabled me to solve the problem: limit RAM usage (Edit > Preferences > Performance > RAM Usage Limit). I set this to 2048Mb - my pc has 8Gb in total. That sounds like not much memory to allocate but AP seems happy with it and performance is now quite ok. 

Maybe that will help in your case, too.

 

7 hours ago, Andrew Crompton said:

Hi, Tovarich

I experienced a similar problem working with a long document (nearly 200 pages, mostly text, about 20 b/w illustrations). In my case, it was not just the performance of AP that was slow: my entire PC almost came to a halt and I often had to wait 30 seconds for it to respond to anything.

I discovered that the PC was simply running out of useable memory: according to Windows Task Manger, memory usage would be over 90%, and most of it was being used by AP.

There is a setting in AP that enabled me to solve the problem: limit RAM usage (Edit > Preferences > Performance > RAM Usage Limit). I set this to 2048Mb - my pc has 8Gb in total. That sounds like not much memory to allocate but AP seems happy with it and performance is now quite ok. 

Maybe that will help in your case, too.

 

8 hours ago, thomaso said:

Hi Tovarich Pizann,

Welcome to the Affinity forums!

141 pages don't seem to be much in APub. There is no such "book" feature in APub yet, as a substitute you can split an .afpub + work with sections but you don't get styles or master pages synchronized between the split documents.

Unfortunately you don't tell in which way your document is "extensive" and what size makes you assume to be the culprit for your experienced delay. Any filters, effects, adjustments applied? What resource file types? Embedded or linked? If linked: saved locally or on a network volume?

Are working with a color space above 8 bit, either with the .afpub or the images? Any resolution above ~ 300 dpi involved?
Do you experience the same when exporting the 3 pages into a PDF with default 'for print' preset?

Hello Thomas,

The document in question is the master from which to generate a “print and play” PDF for a large card game of around 1,250 cards. Each card is 2.5x3.5 inches; most of them are flat PNG files in 8 bit color, while a few (less than 100) are layered Affinity Photo files. All of them are 300dpi and all of them are linked. There is a master page that contains the crop marks that overlay over the cards so it’s obvious where to cut,

Overall performance was fine until about 80 pages. At this point, I can’t scroll more than 2 or 3 pages without the machine pausing, and even saving takes 2-3 minutes. It doesn’t seem like that should be too much; my guess is that there’s a practical limit of around a thousand links per document or something?

 

Edited June 7, 2020 by Tovarich Pizann

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, Tovarich Pizann said:

Hello Thomas,

The document in question is the master from which to generate a “print and play” PDF for a large card game of around 1,250 cards. Each card is 2.5-3.5 inches; most of them are flat PNG files in 8 bit color, while a few (less than 100) are layered Affinity Photo files. All of them are 300dpi and all of them are linked. There is a master page that contains the crop marks that overlay over the cards so it’s obvious where to cut,

Overall performance was fine until about 80 pages. At this point, I can’t scroll more than 2 or 3 pages without the machine pausing, and even saving takes 2-3 minutes. It doesn’t seem like that should be too much; my guess is that there’s a practical limit of around a thousand links per document or something?

Your document description doesn't sound any odd to be responsible for your issues, even though with 1,250 linked image files.

I can't imagine that the number of resources is technically limited in APub but actually I don't know it. From your initial post I thought there was a delay only with printing 3 pages but now you seem to experience delays also when working, in particular scrolling through pages. That sounds like a memory problem when rendering the image previews, maybe caused by the transparencies in placed PNG files? Nevertheless the macOS memory management should be able to handle this without harm, like it does with a RAW editor app + DAM with thousands of large image files. Unfortunately I don't have a comparable Affinity document to test or confirm your issue. I am afraid I have no more idea to solve or avoid it.

Possibly you will get offered a dropbox link by a Serif moderator to upload your document for further investigation. Do I assume right the linked files are stored locally, not on a network volume? Also your hardware model + macOS version may be interesting, and what kind of APub installer you used, either from Apple's app store or from Serif store. Do you notice any massive reduction of free disk space when working in your .afpub?

[Tovarich Pizann]

22 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Do I assume right the linked files are stored locally, not on a network volume? Also your hardware model + macOS version may be interesting, and what kind of APub installer you used, either from Apple's app store or from Serif store. Do you notice any massive reduction of free disk space when working in your .afpub?

Yes, all stored locally, none more than 2 subdirectories down from where the .afpub file itself is stored. It did not occur to me to check hard disk space - I assume you're referring to swap size? I can check for that next time I launch it.

I'm on a "late 2015" iMac. It was the midrange model at the time and is essentially stock. 8 gigs of ram, 1.5 gigs of VRAM on the video card if that matters.

[thomaso]

8 minutes ago, Tovarich Pizann said:

I assume you're referring to swap size?

Not necessarily the swap, rather any temporary but extremely large file(s).

For instance I still have one report in mind which had on mac a 90GB (!) temp file in private/var/folders/.../.../Affinity Publisher/PersonaBackstore.dat
It also occurred similarly on Windows. According to Sean P (Serif) it may be caused by large image data, whereas his response was related to Windows and a deactivatable 'Parallel Processing' (which might not be a relevant info for mac)
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&q=PersonaBackstore.dat

Before you dive into this (possibly without any benefit) you better first check if any massively reduced disk space happens at all in your situation.

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, Tovarich Pizann said:

8 hours ago, Andrew Crompton said:

I discovered that the PC was simply running out of useable memory: according to Windows Task Manger, memory usage would be over 90%, and most of it was being used by AP.

I suspect something similar is the case. I am actually using a Mac, however, and I’m not aware of an equivalent setting to what you’re describing for Windows.

In case you want to give Andrews setting a trial: on mac it is in Affinity Publisher > Preferences > Performance.
Before doing this, you could check in Activity Monitor.app whether RAM is displayed as a problem at all, e.g. by a yellow or red diagram. If this is the case then you will notice improvement by closing other apps when using APub.