Size of Book – How Far Can You Go?

[Last Chance]

I'm just curious.

I'd be interested to learn the size of projects that people are attempting. From my own aspect, my prevous books are  illustrated on every spread, about 300pp in length, with pages measuring 210x280mm and I never had problems with InDesign.

I've yet to make that leap of faith with Publisher (footnotes permitting), so is the format I propose too ambitious?

[MikeTO]

I doubt you'll have any problems using Publisher for your needs, I'm creating an equally complex book in Publisher on an old MacBook and it's surprisingly fast. I have hundreds of photos in my book, too.

[John Rostron]

@MikeTO, are your images linked or embedded?

John

[Last Chance]

@MikeTOThanks for the feedback.

@John RostronThat's a very good point and I'll be interested in Mike's feedback.

Personally, I think using linked images is the only way to go. In the main folder where I keep the images there are something like 36,000 and 101GB worth of data. Naturally, I will only be using a fraction of these, but it does demonstrate how unwieldy a book can become if the images were embedded.

My project is rather mind-blowing (for me, anyway) as it's likely to be spread over five immense volumes of about 500–600pp, or ten volumes over the user-friendly 300pp each (hence my question). I've written about 460,000 words so far so it's very difficult ATM to calculate the best way forward, but I feel that sub-dividing the book into the various points in history is most pertinent.

Thanks for the help,

David

[MikeTO]

I agree with David. Linked images is the way to go for anything longer than a booklet. If you're laying out a book do yourself a favour and use linked images to reduce the amount of memory required, improve the app's performance, and keep your file size manageable. It's also much, much easier to update images later.

 

[MikeTO]

Also, I recommend using TIFF for images in a book. Avoid more complex formats such as PSD and formats intended for on-screen use such as JPG.

[Old Bruce]

Caveat: Store the files on the computer's hard drive or on an external hard drive which is not a networked hard drive, have a wire from the computer to the hard drive.
I would recommend making a folder with Affinity Photo/Designer documents of the pictures you are going to use. And then I would set up a folder to hold the TIFF files I am using as links. For the Designer documents I would most likely just place those.
Do all the adjustments, colour correcting etc in Photo and then use the Export Persona to export TIFFs (of the appropriate size and colour format) and turn on the Continuous Export in the Export Persona so any edits in Photo will be reflected in the TIFFs when you save the Photo Document. Use Publisher's auto update feature for placed linked files and it works really well. 
File structure is like this

Book:
  Publisher Documents:
    Book v1.afpub
    Book v2.afpub
    Book v3.afpub
  Images:
    Designer Documents:
      Drawing 01.afdesigner
      Drawing 02.afdesigner
      Drawing 03.afdesigner
      
    Photo Docuements:
      001.afphoto
      002.afphoto
      003.afphoto
      004.afphoto
      005.afphoto
    Tiffs:
      001.TIFF
      002.TIFF
      003.TIFF
      004.TIFF
      005.TIFF

[Last Chance]

@MikeTOI tend to use PNG or TIFF (rarely JPEG) depending on usage. PNG is often far smaller as a filesize.

@Old BruceFair point about having a remote drive. In fact, I have three backups - a) to a 1GB HDD via wire, b) a 256GB USB stick, c) 512GB cloud storage. Call me paranoid, but you can never tell! 😉

[MikeTO]

16 hours ago, Last Chance said:

@MikeTOI tend to use PNG or TIFF (rarely JPEG) depending on usage. PNG is often far smaller as a filesize.

Be careful about PNG. It was designed for on-screen use and doesn't support non-RGB colour spaces such as CMYK which makes it a poor choice for professional printing.

[Last Chance]

@MikeTOThanks, I was aware of this. However, much of the image content is monochrome (or sepia tinted) and any colour problems are picked up through at least one proofing stage (that is, proofs from the printers).