Poor management of RAM with publisher

[notabene34]

Hi there
I have been using the Affinity suite for almost 2 years now. I am an old user of the Adobe suite since 1990. I was employed in a printing company or I did layout. I have been retired for 5 years but I continue to work on my own as an auto entrepreneur. Now the cost of the subscription to the Adobe suite has become prohibitive for me, that's why I invested in the Affinity suite which gives me full satisfaction so far. On the other hand, there is a big problem with RAM management with Publisher. Indeed until now I worked on small projects but I have an old work laid out with InDesign to redo. It is a catalog in A4 format of 92 pages including many photos. So I opened the Indesign file in IDML format with Publisher but it's not possible because the RAM used by the software exceeds 10.33 GB while the same version under Indesign is only 1.83 GB! Everything is blocked and impossible to get out of it other than by the forced stop of Publisher. I have a 2021 Imac 24 inch M1 with 8 GB of ram. On the Affinity site, I can't find any information on the minimum configuration required. Will I have to go back to the Adobe suite? Separate my work into several documents? I am really very disappointed by this poor management of RAM.
Does anyone have any idea how to get me out of this problem?
Thank you all

[v_kyr]

Well Publisher is (sadly) know to be a memory hog. - In your case you can try out if exporting from Indesign as PDF and importing that then in APub makes any difference here in terms of overall memory usage. Other than that, seperating the Indesign doc then exported as chunks and trying to work with several docs and in the end combine those might be another way to try out and possibly to overcome with those APub memory problems.

[Pšenda]

5 hours ago, notabene34 said:

including many photos

Are the photos embedded using Linked or Embedded?
To work on the document, smaller (and more memory-saving) photo previews could be attached, and the originals would be replaced only before the final export/printing.

[MikeTO]

I'm unsure why your smaller book is using so much RAM but as Psenda asked, are you linking or embedding? Linking is the way to go.

My book project currently has 500 photos which are 12GB combined - I need to optimize them - and Publisher uses about 3.4 GB of RAM.

[DWright]

As @Pšendamentioned if you have a large number of embedded photos in your document each of these will be loaded into memory when the document is loaded 

[notabene34]

all my photos are linked !

[notabene34]

to follow up on this subject, I would like to point out that the creation of an A5 format file of 80 blank pages already weighs 2.37 GB! in activity monitor

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, notabene34 said:

to follow up on this subject, I would like to point out that the creation of an A5 format file of 80 blank pages already weighs 2.37 GB! in activity monitor

For me, 80 A5 pages consumed 1.5GB and 500 pages consumed 2.1GB. I don't know why it would consume so much more for you given we're using the same version of Publisher and we're both on Apple Silicon chips. The only thing I can think of is I tried it immediately after starting Publisher - you may get different results if you've been working in the app for a while.

Regardless, I agree that's a lot of memory for blank pages but the good news is that it doesn't consume that much more if you add content to them. That 500 page document which was 2.1GB when empty was 2.8GB when I filled all the pages with dense text.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.