Placed PDFs being included in exported PDFs every time they occur instead of only once

[CorvusC]

PDFs exported from Publisher that contain multiple copies of placed PDFs (e.g. a logo appearing on every page) contain a copy of the place PDF for every occurrence in the document. The expected behaviour would be for the placed file to be included only once and referenced wherever it occurs. The colour space information in a simple vector PDF takes up far more space than the image data and quickly creates a very large file (I produced a 17-page document which, on export, was over 18MB. Acrobat's Audit Space Usage showed that 15MB of this was accounted for by colour spaces. Using Acrobat's optimize function to discard objects and user data and clean up the file got rid of these, and left a 3MB file without any recompression of the images).

Acrobat's Preflight inventory feature shows the multiple copies of the placed PDFs. However, this only happens with PDFs that are linked in the Publisher document, or PDFs that are embedded but the source PDF is still available in its original location. Moving the source file for the placed PDF to the trash immediately results in a reduction of the estimated file size in the export dialog, and Acrobat's inventory shows only one copy of it in the resulting PDF.

To reproduce: open the attached .afpub file. It includes the linked Logo.pdf on a master page, and has two pages based on that master. Start an export with the standard "PDF (for print)" preset - you will see the estimated file size to be around 966kB (you may need to change the PDF Passthrough setting in the Preflight profile to PDF 1.5 for it to export correctly). Create another page based on the same master and start the export again - the file size estimate will increase to around 1.4MB. Change the linked file to embedded in resource manager and export again - same size. Now delete or the logo PDF file - the exported file reduces to about 550kB, as it has only one copy of the passed-through logo, which would be the expected behaviour.

Affinity Publisher 1.9.0, Mac os 10.12.6, MacBook Pro 15" (2016)

PDF passthrough test.afpub Logo.pdf

[Old Bruce]

I think this would be expected. One image versus two or three. Doesn't matter if the image is the same thing in Publisher in the PDF it is on several pages. Use the metaphor of ink and weight of the paper if that helps.

[CorvusC]

This is definitely not expected, as evidenced by the results with an embedded file, and is not what InDesign would produce, for example. For a file to contain 20 (or however many) identical copies of an image is an error.