Affinity Publisher file increased from 150Mb to 4Gb

[georglind]

I have an affinity publisher file of a book (roughly 250 pages) that used to be 150Mb (a lot of linked images, only a few embedded). Now the book is up for reprint and I wanted to fix a few things and I have been working on a file that now suddenly is almost 4Gb in size. This happened before the change to Affinity Publisher 2. Any advice on how to reign in the file size?

Oh. Btw, I'm on MacOS 12.6 on an Apple M1 chip.

[carl123]

I think there was an issue where some linked files were changing to being embedded in the document rather than linked

The "cure" for this was to use Resource Manager to change all the Linked files to embedded then to change them back to linked and do a Save as... to a new file name

Please try this on a COPY of your document as sometimes I speak complete and utter b*llocks when I have not had enough coffee after I wake up.

Let us know how it goes

[georglind]

51 minutes ago, carl123 said:

The "cure" for this was to use Resource Manager to change all the Linked files to embedded then to change them back to linked and do a Save as... to a new file name

Please try this on a COPY of your document as sometimes I speak complete and utter b*llocks when I have not had enough coffee after I wake up.

Let us know how it goes

This worked a charm. Now the filesize is all the way down to 50Mb. Thanks a bunch!

[JJGraphics]

I am having exactly the same problem with a document in Publisher 2.03.

The troublesome document is similar to a previous one in its layout. Both documents were started in Publisher 1. The first document is 75.4Mb for 176 pages, the second is 507Mb for 95 pages.

I have tried the trick of switching to embedded images and then back to linked images, then saving the document under a different name and that makes absolutely no difference to the file size.

I am also experiencing random crashes when exporting a document to PDF.

[MikeTO]

10 hours ago, JJGraphics said:

I am having exactly the same problem with a document in Publisher 2.03.

The troublesome document is similar to a previous one in its layout. Both documents were started in Publisher 1. The first document is 75.4Mb for 176 pages, the second is 507Mb for 95 pages.

I have tried the trick of switching to embedded images and then back to linked images, then saving the document under a different name and that makes absolutely no difference to the file size.

I am also experiencing random crashes when exporting a document to PDF.

Hi JJ and welcome to the forum.

I've seen some reports online of failures when exporting to PDF - typically these seem to be with embedded documents.

For the file size issue, are you using Mac or Windows? If Mac, are you using Intel or M1/2?

How big were the documents in v1 versus v2 or did they grow in size before you moved to v2?

Cheers

[JJGraphics]

On 1/11/2023 at 2:23 AM, MikeTO said:

Hi JJ and welcome to the forum.

I've seen some reports online of failures when exporting to PDF - typically these seem to be with embedded documents.

For the file size issue, are you using Mac or Windows? If Mac, are you using Intel or M1/2?

How big were the documents in v1 versus v2 or did they grow in size before you moved to v2?

Cheers

Thanks for you reply.

I never experienced any crashes whilst exporting to PDF in V1. As a matter of routine, I never embed anything in a Publisher document.

I'm using Macs and have tried the file on both Intel and M1 machines with exactly the same result.

The first document which I referred to was around 75Mb in V1 and has not been edited but has been opened and then saved as a V2 document. It remains the same size at around 75Mb.

The current troublesome document was getting larger (about 200Mb) in V1 but has grown considerably as I have progressed with editing it in V2 . . .

JJ

[MikeTO]

On 1/10/2023 at 11:08 AM, JJGraphics said:

I am also experiencing random crashes when exporting a document to PDF.

We've learned this week that there's a bug with exporting documents with hyperlinks to PDF. If any of the URLs are invalid or even have a blank space at the end, as is common when you copy and paste from somewhere, Publisher will fail to export the PDF. So double check all of your URLs with the Hyperlinks panel if you are using links.

When Serif is able to reply to this thread they may ask for the PDF log - here are instructions for PDF logging.

Good luck!

 

[JJGraphics]

29 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

We've learned this week that there's a bug with exporting documents with hyperlinks to PDF. If any of the URLs are invalid or even have a blank space at the end, as is common when you copy and paste from somewhere, Publisher will fail to export the PDF. So double check all of your URLs with the Hyperlinks panel if you are using links.

When Serif is able to reply to this thread they may ask for the PDF log - here are instructions for PDF logging.

Good luck!

 

Thanks for the info.

Interestingly, I've just carried out a test of exporting the 75Mb document to PDF which was successful, where it had previously failed. However it did appear to take a lot longer to export the PDF than it used to do in V1.

The document contains one hyperlink in the text and uses the option to generate PDF bookmarks. All images are linked; nothing is embedded.

If I encounter the PDF export problem again, I'll  record the log as suggested.

JJ

[JJGraphics]

Just for info: the growing file size problem is not fixed for me in version 2.0.4

JJ

[JJGraphics]

No further comments on this problem. Is anything likely to be done about it?

JJ

[Lee D]

It may be worth signing up to our new 2.1 beta so you can test in that version and report back in the dedicated beta forum if it's still an issue.

[JJGraphics]

Hi Lee,

Many thanks. I've joined and downloaded the Beta version. Will report in the Beta forum.

JJ