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Multi-page PDF placement problems in 1.9.0


nomi02118

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I have a series of books to produce that involves placing PDF articles, lots of them, up to 300 pages worth into the document then exporting  to Blurb. (This is personal project for my brother, collecting all his published articles into several volumes to have them all in one place and looking nice.) The project was started over 3 years ago in InDesign which handles the PDF thing easily while Publisher has had problems. The new version seemed to work REALLY well. I tried letting Publisher reformat the PDFs and it did OK but not good enough, fonts were wrong and the text was broken up in weird ways. This is not usually a problem as it just takes some manual fixing with a 3 page doc but 300 pages makes it unusable. So I placed the PDF and that worked super well... until I closed and reopened the project file. 10-15 minutes later it wouldn't open. It had some issues even with a 3 page test, as well. It was using a HUGE amount of RAM.  Now I have resorted to exporting each articles from the InDesign doc separately as high quality JPGs to keep the size down and placing them that way. Works well, processes fast but it's a slow workaround. The fact the PDFs are multipage and many pages seems to be the problem. 

I hope I explained that clearly and would like to know if I am doing something terrible wrong or if this is a problem that can solved in future. I could just keep using Indesign to finish, but I think no one here would blame me for not wanting to do that! 

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Do you have your document configured to Embed the Placed PDF files or Link them?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
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1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Do you have your document configured to Embed the Placed PDF files or Link them?

I tried it both ways but had the same problem, sadly. I have hopes it's something that will get worked out as they improve the PDF stuff. They do a lot of work to keep improving things. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
4 hours ago, Gabe said:

It would be great if you could replicate the issue, yeah. You can save it as an afpackage, zip the folder up and upload it on this link please: https://www.dropbox.com/request/3dEJlXMmpjfOI1yPlcYz

Ok I remade a version of the document and like before it worked like a charm and I saved it. Then I tried to package it and that transferred the PDF to the folder and never went any further after 20 minutes. I had to force quit and reopen and it did not reopen. I just kept loading for 15 minutes and I had to force quit again. So instead of the package dossier I made a dossier with the pdf and .afpub file. I hope that can help you recreate the problem there. (EDIT: I tried to reopen the folder again and it did... after 15 minutes so I tried to package it again and after another 20 minutes fgot this message but it seemed to work to I uploaded packaged dossier. Maybe seeing both will help. So even though it finally worked in the end, it's definitely hanging up somewhere along the way. 

Thanks for looking into this. Being able to use PDFs is part of my plan to convince a client to switch to Affinity over their 17 year version of Quark Xpress. 

 

Screen Shot 2021-02-19 at 08.46.47.png

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28 minutes ago, Gabe said:

If I load the afpackage it crashes the app on my end (issue logged), but the afpub file loads fine. I wonder if it's your very old PDF version (1.3) that's causing the issue. Is there any reason why you use such an old version? 

Turns out Apple's Preview app only saves as 1.3 and seems to convert files to 1.3 for "compatibility" which might make sense in general but might be working against us here. Many of the files I recieved were from institutions and were in 1.4 - 1.7 these places are notorious for never upgrading  but also need to send stuff to places that might not have the resources to update. I will try and find a way to save the files to a higher version and see how that goes, 

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This definitely seems to be a problem with the old version. I tried another file saved into pdf with publishers at version 1.7 and it was super fast and no problems at all. I never thought that apple's program would be saving at such an old version and Publisher only handles down to version 1.4 from what I understand. I guess the next step is to encourage Apple to provide more than saving as 1.3 as an option. Seems reasonable to ask for that but who knows if they will do anything or not! I might have to import my source files into publishers and export them as a higher version and hope that works! 

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1 minute ago, Gabe said:

I know for a fact we can't export anything lower the 1.4, but I'm not too sure about importing. (most likely officially supporting 1.4 or higher too, but will need to check this with our developers)

I really appreciate the effort and at least I know what the problem is. I seem to remember years ago there being some unhappiness with Affinity only supporting 1.4 but I assumed like a fool that no one would be using anything lower at this point. I was able to import it but then couldn't open it after the file was closed and saved, So I am hoping I can just place the old pdf in a document and export to a newer pdf version, not save the document and just use the new file. It's not exactly efficient use of time but it's faster than crashing Publisher with old files! 

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