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HUGE file sizes


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No, why? You never worked with other Publishers?

Linking images saves much of you file weight, but the app has to store tons of data (size, scaling, position, wrapping data, stroke values, background, transparency data and much, much more. Additionaly the file has to store the preview image in your layout, and this is probably the bigger the less dpi it has. In most Publishers (Quark, InDesign, iCalamus, Viva, …) the preview image of a downscaled 72 dpi image is much, much heavier, than a 300 dpi image placed with 100% size. I am not sitting in front of my computer, so I can‘t verify this actually.

Additionally, the file size grows, when you „save“ the document, because deleted elements normally aren‘t deleted from the file, when saving the document. For speed reasons, this happens only, when you „save as“ your file.

So, I think, there is no reason to worry about the file size.

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2 hours ago, mac_heibu said:

In most Publishers (Quark, InDesign, iCalamus, Viva, …) the preview image of a downscaled 72 dpi image is much, much heavier, than a 300 dpi image placed with 100% size.

This is definitely not the case. We regularly work with image heavy indesign files, they are never over 100MB whereas often individual artwork files can be well over that on their own. 

As far as I’m concerned, the point of linking is twofold:

- Keeps the file size manageable 

- Allows a team to work on the preparation of a document in parallel, ie editting artwork while someone else is doing the layout

edit: re the original post, it seems to me that linking isn’t working properly at the moment given some of the other problems around it. Maybe it is embedding it, leaving it embedded even when it says linked?

Edited by robinp
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probably somewhere in between Mac_Heibu and Robinp's answers. The preview proxy files are stored in the document. Those add up. It won't be as big as embedded documents in any case.  What Mac_Heibu said is true in a specific way.  If you have a 300ppi image that Publisher or inDesign is scaling down, then the EFFECTIVE RESOLUTION of that image increases. So if it's at 50% it is now 600 ppi in effective resolution. What Mac_Heibu is saying is that if you have that image resized by 50% prior to placing it in Publisher, then when you place it at 100% you will have that same image size output with an Effective Resolution of 300% not 600%.  

What I do with oversized images, usually is to work with them at their effective resolution throughout the layout process. Then upon packaging and preparing for output, I edit the placed files and reduce and sharpen them in an image editor so they end up at 100% 300ppi.  This works very well if you remember to package the links. Then the edit you make to the linked file is on a copy not your masters.

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4 minutes ago, Sonofwitz said:

What Mac_Heibu said is true in a specific way.  If you have a 300ppi image that Publisher or inDesign is scaling down, then the EFFECTIVE RESOLUTION of that image increases.

This maybe true in the final export / print, it certainly isn’t the case in InDesign for the embedded previews which is what this thread is about.

Just running with the principle, there would be no point in embedding a lower quality preview in InDesign if it actually resulted in a larger, slower file.

What is clear with AP is that it isn’t properly linking files. It embeds them for sure, in their full, high quality glory. This makes file sizes big and slow.

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26 minutes ago, robinp said:

edit: re the original post, it seems to me that linking isn’t working properly at the moment given some of the other problems around it. Maybe it is embedding it, leaving it embedded even when it says linked?

Considering it's in beta, that's what I thought as well, but wanted to point it out.

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2 hours ago, mac_heibu said:

No, why? You never worked with other Publishers?

Linking images saves much of you file weight, but the app has to store tons of data (size, scaling, position, wrapping data, stroke values, background, transparency data and much, much more. Additionaly the file has to store the preview image in your layout, and this is probably the bigger the less dpi it has. In most Publishers (Quark, InDesign, iCalamus, Viva, …) the preview image of a downscaled 72 dpi image is much, much heavier, than a 300 dpi image placed with 100% size. I am not sitting in front of my computer, so I can‘t verify this actually.

Additionally, the file size grows, when you „save“ the document, because deleted elements normally aren‘t deleted from the file, when saving the document. For speed reasons, this happens only, when you „save as“ your file.

So, I think, there is no reason to worry about the file size.

As others have pointed out, this does seem to be a problem. With only two pages of content the AP file size has swollen far beyond any of the other 23 ID files in the series with 64 full pages. And regarding "tons of data," my IDML files are generally 95% smaller than the working ID files.

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24 minutes ago, robinp said:

What is clear with AP is that it isn’t properly linking files. It embeds them for sure, in their full, high quality glory. This makes file sizes big and slow.

It's actually considerably worse than that, which is why I included the stats about the image sizes.

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2 minutes ago, Barry_Edmiston said:

It's actually considerably worse than that, which is why I included the stats about the image sizes.

Yeah, fair enough. Maybe there is some kind of caching going on as well? Thats pure speculation, but it clearly this embedded images / file linking / file size issue needs sorting out. 

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4 hours ago, robinp said:

This is definitely not the case. We regularly work with image heavy indesign files, they are never over 100MB whereas often individual artwork files can be well over that on their own. 

How I like contributions like this! „This is definitely not the case“! Why do you state something like this without even trying it?

Here an example:

I took 2 instances of one (the same) image (TIF, ZIP compressed) in InDesign (thats, among other app, one I talkerd about):

(a) 5120 x 2880 px, 11,3 MB, 72 dpi, file size: 11,3 MB

(b) 5120 x 2880 px, 11,3 MB, 300 dpi, i, file size: 11,3 MB (the image was of course only recalculated, but not resampled)

I placed image (a) in a newly created InDesign document in a proportional width of 20 cm and saved it. I did exactly the same with image (b).

  • The first InDesign document with image (a) has a file size of 1,7 MB.
  • The second InDesign document with image (b) has a file size of 1,1 MB (!!)
  • If I now adjust the image in Photoshop by recalculating it to the needed 20 cm/300 dpi and place this image in a third InDesign document, the saved file has a file size of 1 MB

You see: What I said „is definitely the case“! :)

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9 hours ago, Sonofwitz said:

What I do with oversized images, usually is to work with them at their effective resolution throughout the layout process. Then upon packaging and preparing for output, I edit the placed files and reduce and sharpen them in an image editor so they end up at 100% 300ppi.

LinkOptimizer is an amazing InDesign plugin for automating that. You can add USM and colour separation to process queue.

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6 hours ago, mac_heibu said:

How I like contributions like this! „This is definitely not the case“! Why do you state something like this without even trying it?

Here an example:

I took 2 instances of one (the same) image (TIF, ZIP compressed) in InDesign (thats, among other app, one I talkerd about):

(a) 5120 x 2880 px, 11,3 MB, 72 dpi, file size: 11,3 MB

(b) 5120 x 2880 px, 11,3 MB, 300 dpi, i, file size: 11,3 MB (the image was of course only recalculated, but not resampled)

I placed image (a) in a newly created InDesign document in a proportional width of 20 cm and saved it. I did exactly the same with image (b).

  • The first InDesign document with image (a) has a file size of 1,7 MB.
  • The second InDesign document with image (b) has a file size of 1,1 MB (!!)
  • If I now adjust the image in Photoshop by recalculating it to the needed 20 cm/300 dpi and place this image in a third InDesign document, the saved file has a file size of 1 MB

You see: What I said „is definitely the case“! :)

What I understood from your previous post was that you were inserting two images with the same physical dimensions but different DPI. Ie one with vastly higher resolution which you were saying is smaller when linked.

I can now see you are talking about something else but it wasn’t clear before. 

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I think, it was clear:

Many people place 72 dpi images and (necessarily) scale them down to fit the layout, instead of setting these images to, let’s say, 300 dpi (without resampling of course) before placing them in a layout application. The image itself and its file size will be unchanged by this, but the size of the document, in which the images are placed will be much smaller.

But there seems to be another reason, why the process of linking images (instead of leaving them embedded) doesn’t reduce the file size drastically. This may have to do with the interchangeability of Publisher documents with Photo or Designer. As you will be able to edit the elements of a Publisher document „on the fly" in a different application, these elements have to be embedded. Otherwise you would have to modify the original image, what obviously isn’t desirable.

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28 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

 

But there seems to be another reason, why the process of linking images (instead of leaving them embedded) doesn’t reduce the file size drastically. This may have to do with the interchangeability of Publisher documents with Photo or Designer. As you will be able to edit the elements of a Publisher document „on the fly" in a different application, these elements have to be embedded. Otherwise you would have to modify the original image, what obviously isn’t desirable.

What someone from Affinity has confirmed in another thread is that a preference for embedding vs linked will be set per document with the ability to override for individual items. To me this sounds perfect as long as the linked files don't result in these crazy file sizes.

ps, I should have said, it wasn't 'clear to me' rather than 'it wasn't clear'. Sorry.

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2 hours ago, mac_heibu said:

This may have to do with the interchangeability of Publisher documents with Photo or Designer. As you will be able to edit the elements of a Publisher document „on the fly" in a different application, these elements have to be embedded. Otherwise you would have to modify the original image, what obviously isn’t desirable.

  • If the original needs to be modified, why would you not want to modify it?
  • this functionality exists in InDesign – "open original" – with no file bloat
  • "linked" means the image is not retained in the app. With InDesign, if a linked image is not where it's expected, the picture frame is blank.

I haven't seen the other thread, but I agree that a universal document setting for linking images might/should provide a solution to the file size issue. Right now you can only ink after the image has been embedded.

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You don‘t understand, what I mean!

Place a PDF, double click it, modify it. Now you have a modified PDF in your document. The original isn‘t touched at all.

This is the way it works and the way it should work. Or do you want to risc, that modifying a PDF in Publisher will affect the original and in consequence all other documents, in which you have placed this PDF?

This workflow is only possible, if Publisher embeds the PDF.

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4 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

You don‘t understand, what I mean!

Place a PDF, double click it, modify it. Now you have a modified PDF in your document. The original isn‘t touched at all.

This is the way it works and the way it should work. Or do you want to risc, that modifying a PDF in Publisher will affect the original and in consequence all other documents, in which you have placed this PDF?

This workflow is only possible, if Publisher embeds the PDF.

My reading of it is that @Barry_Edmiston has understood, he just disagrees with it being an important workflow regarding 'editing the original image'.

He is saying that in the indesign workflow, this is exactly what happens. As for our workflow, there is almost never a reason we would want a version of an image to be unique to what is embedded within Publisher. Invariably you want to be able to reuse images in many different documents, perhaps many different Publisher files. You therefore need the original file to also be the one that is updated.

Very occasionally you might want to do a mark up of an image specifically for a document. In that case, I can imagine embedding the image out of choice so that the marked up version only exists in the Publisher document, but this should be a positive choice to do it that way, not to default to being embedded.

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25 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

You don‘t understand, what I mean!

Place a PDF, double click it, modify it. Now you have a modified PDF in your document. The original isn‘t touched at all.

This is the way it works and the way it should work. Or do you want to risc, that modifying a PDF in Publisher will affect the original and in consequence all other documents, in which you have placed this PDF?

This workflow is only possible, if Publisher embeds the PDF.

In my work (book layout), I have never even imagined placing a PDF inside a document – off-topic, but I'm curious; why and when do you do that?

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Every times I (1.) get a 3rd party PDF and (2.) I have no access to the original document and (3.)  I want/need to modify something – perhaps simply a misspelled word.

Normally I do this in Acrobat Pro. Now we can do this in Publisher – fine!

 

But: This applies to images too! Just wait, until we have the 1.7 update of Affinity Photo, then you can modify placed images „on the fly“ without affecting the original version of the image. I do this very, very often: Placing an images in different documents, which need to be always a little bit different for design reasons. This will be easily done within the Affinity suite!

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I did this already, when I only got files as PDF or I didn't have to change something, but to just place it (like a logo et cetera). Very useful also when you have an almost finished book and someone tells you that the've given you wrong dimensions of the book. So placing a PDF might be a quick way to rescale. There are may use cases, some sound to stupid to be true, but..

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1 hour ago, mac_heibu said:

Every times I (1.) get a 3rd party PDF and (2.) I have no access to the original document and (3.)  I want/need to modify something – perhaps simply a misspelled word.

Normally I do this in Acrobat Pro. Now we can do this in Publisher – fine!

But: This applies to images too! Just wait, until we have the 1.7 update of Affinity Photo, then you can modify placed images „on the fly“ without affecting the original version of the image. I do this very, very often: Placing an images in different documents, which need to be always a little bit different for design reasons. This will be easily done within the Affinity suite!

Thanks, but now I'm even more confused. Here's a 1-page PDF (left) placed into Publisher (right). There is nothing editable about it, and the background is rendered in gray. If I wanted to correct a misspelling, I would have to create a text box, match font, size, and color, and very carefully paste it over the other word. That's easier than correcting it in a PDF editor?

temp-pdf.png

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1 hour ago, thadeusz said:

I did this already, when I only got files as PDF or I didn't have to change something, but to just place it (like a logo et cetera). Very useful also when you have an almost finished book and someone tells you that the've given you wrong dimensions of the book. So placing a PDF might be a quick way to rescale. There are may use cases, some sound to stupid to be true, but..

Thanks. I don't work with clients so it's never even occurred to me!

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