Publisher file size massive increase with many linked PDFs

[Chris Sharp]

I have a recurring problem with Publisher files suddenly inflating from a few MB to 10 and then 100s of MB.

I create a vector image in Designer. Export multiple layers to PDFs. The PDFs are a few KB each. The PDF layers are placed into Publisher pages, linked. Each page in publisher has the PDFs from the previous page along with another PDF appearing above the previous. The PDFs are all the same size with single component on each. This stack of PDFs builds up the image page by page. By page 30 the PDF on page 1 has been linked 30 times. Resource Manager has hundreds of linked PDFs.

The file size grows as expected reaching a few MBs. Then, without a apparent reason, the file size with jump to 10s of MB in size. eg a jump from 7MB to 63MB. The next Save may double it's size again. On several documents I have files which are over 250 MB. 

When the file is exported it produces a PDF around 10MB in size. 

There is no reason I can find that the file will suddenly explode to 20 or 30 times it's size.

The same bug occurs on Windows and macOS

Cheers

Chris

Edited December 17, 2024 by Chris Sharp

[NathanC]

Hi @Chris Sharp welcome to the forums & apologies for the delayed response.

Are you able to supply us with a copy of one of these documents where you have experienced this unexpected file size inflation so we can take a look? If it contains many linked documents it may be best to send it to us using File -> Save as Package and then saving to an empty folder. Once you've saved to the folder compress it to a .ZIP and upload it below.

https://www.dropbox.com/request/sTO7ImNwGFF26uFTsGBU

Thanks

[Chris Sharp]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

file uploaded.

We've had this problem consistently with serval documents. We initially thought it was because we were working with two editors via dropbox. But I have recreated the bug solo on my local machine. Once the file balloons out to these sort of sizes Publisher becomes slow and unstable. When we export we get a PDF or 10-20MB, which is what we have come to expect of this type of document.

Cheers

Chris

[NathanC]

Many thanks, the file without any PDFs embedded is only ~144KB so there's nothing wrong with the file itself, but i'm definitely observing the same speed and long saving times with the linked PDFs present, as you've mentioned there also isn't really a clear reason for these linked files to trigger this type of file size inflation as far as I can tell, so I'll get this example logged for further investigation with the developers.

[Chris Sharp]

Thank you,

I've uploaded another version of the document. The second version I created from scratch on my local machine. Images that only appear once or twice were copied and pasted in from Designer. Images that appear many times were exported from Designer and Placed into Publisher. This reduced the number of linked PDFs from 110 to 39. I still had the same problem.

I can supply further examples for documents that have inflated this way.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "User file containing many linked PDF files has unexpectedly inflated file size, speed and saving issues" (REF: AF-5488) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.3078). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[Chris Sharp]

This is great news. I very much appreciate the work done by your developers to sort this issue.

Initial tests with the beta version are going well.

We are looking forward to getting back to our projects, which have been on hold for several months.