Linked PDF explodes Publisher document filesize

[4dimage]

If have a PDF flyer (aproximately 3 MB) linked into a Publisher layout.

 

With the PDF the Publisher filesize is about 18.5 MB. If i delete the linked PDF from my document the Publisher filesize is only about 3.2 MB.

The Publisher filesize with linked PDF becomes even bigger than the linked PDF filesize itself ? This remembers me of the early v1.x behaviour before you even could link external resources properly.

 

[Luke Graybill]

I have seen this same problem (quoting myself from another older post that seems to have lost traction) where a file containing linked PDFs is gigantic, and the file size changes every time I save it (even when using save as):
 

On 11/18/2022 at 1:38 AM, Luke Graybill said:

I'm also seeing this problem with Publisher 2. A file that under Publisher 1 was 463MB (there are a lot of images embedded), but opening the file in Publisher 2 and saving it without making any changes balloons the filesize to 777MB. Using Save As to save two more copies increased the filesize again each time, even though I made zero changes to the content:

 

The "Interior (from pub 1)" file at the top of my screenshot is the original file last saved under Publisher 1, the others are copies of the same file saved by Publisher 2.

Edit: I'm using Windows 11, so technically this is I guess the wrong part of the forum for me to chime in, but it was relevant otherwise so I figured why not. Sorry if I'm just adding noise though!

I had thought this was due to moving from Publisher 1 to Publisher 2 with the same file, but perhaps not.

Edited November 24, 2022 by Luke Graybill

[D. Bakel]

I can also confirm this behavior. I have a 40 page Document with some 19 PDF's linked inside. Each linked PDF file has about 300 to 800 kb.

Without the linked PDF's the document has 6,7 MB filesize. After linking the PDF's, the size grows up to more than 100 MB.

Yesterday the same file has had more than 200 MB filesize. A trick i read here in this forum was to include all linked files listed in resourcemanager and then linking it again. This step reduced filesize by 50% to around 100 MB.

@Dan C Have a look at the file i uploaded for another thread.

[Corgi]

This reminds me a bit of the embedded RAW file size issue with Afphoto, in which it appears that Serif have optimized Photo for speed rather than file size, as the added size penalty for embedding a RAW file is substantially larger than the original RAW file itself.

Presumably, Publisher is saving rasterized thumbnails of the linked PDFs to speed things up, but of course, rasterization can consume much more space than unrasterized text. It would be really nice to have options for trading off speed versus file size.

[4dimage]

Sorry serif guys - i know at the moment you are in big trouble and try your best to answer the questions here. Of course one may not know where to start to process the big pile of bug reports here.

But gradualiy i get the the feeling that some bugs are deliberately ignored by serif ? I constantly posted a hand full of quite clear bugs during the last two weeks and got only 1 reaction from the staff. So do many other users who spend a lot of time to investigate / recreate the errors to post some reasonable reports with videos, screenshots and example files.

Meanwhile other "fresh" bugs are answered with "Thanks for reporting this. I've replicated the issue and passed it onto development." after some hours or at least 1-2 days. It feels that these bugs are more related to the "new killer features" (haha, already had a vector warp in CorelDraw in the mid 1990s...) than the "boring" basic features like boolean operations, file sizes and so on...

[Callum]

Hi 4dimage,

I apologise for the delayed response to this thread please could upload a copy of the file to the following DropBox link? This will allow me to investigate this further and hopefully identify the cause of this issue. Please could you also tell me if this file was originally created in V1?

https://www.dropbox.com/request/FDiUgWtJ89u3T5WsBpTV

Thanks
C

[4dimage]

Hi Callum,

sorry, but i forgot to set the document priority to "linked" files in the dropbox .afpub (which should be proved). But you can reproduce this wih a fresh Publisher document yourself.

---

The initial file was created in publisher v1. I opended it in Publisher v2 and saved with new name. To reproduce the behaviour create any new v2 Publisher document.

There are two images files for this test.

I have a PDF i got from the customer (Floristik-06-22.pdf) - filesize about 3 MB and a flat JPG i exported as page 1 from the PDF.

1) I open a fresh v2 Publisher DIN A4 document - image priority "linked". I save it and it has about 1.4 MB filesize:

 

2) Now i create a new image frame and (link) place the PDF into the image frame via drag/drop from the Windows explorer:

 

After saving the Publisher document now it filesize has grown extemely to about 16.5 MB. This is even about 5 times the filesize of the linked PDF:

 

 

3) TEST: if i replace the PDF by a flat JPG instead -> save as, the Publisher filesize almost drops back to about it's initial filesize. So linked JPG (maybe flat PNG, TIFF, ... too) barely increase the filesize - this is the expected behaviour for ALL linked files:

 

In some other posts here in the forum other users complain about gigantic Designer and Publisher files (x GB) although they also used linked resources - not embedded them. Maybe this applies to all filetypes that contain layers somehow (.psd, .pdf, .afpub, .afdesign, ...) ?

This problem applied also to v1. For some reasons your developers seem to embed redundant data of linked resources uncompressed in the linking document.

Speed may be important, but filesize is too! It's not acceptable to have all resources on the network (properly compressed) and then explode redundant copies of them into a layout file. All data has to be backuped and take multiplied time to process and disk space on the backup media!