A crazy huge file

[Hud1ai2 2]

Good evening,

just a quick question.

I really love Affinity products. But one thing drives me crazy in last days. I'm working on catalog in Publisher and I have almost the same (in content way - pictures, texts) file from last year, which was made in Indesign. And here is the thing. Even I'm using link to pictures to decrease the final size of file, the Publisher file has almost 1,5GB! unlike the 55MB of file from Indesign. How is this possible? There is only one possibility. Linking of pictures in Publisher isn't  true linking and the picture is included in Publisher file. The next thing is, the program crashes with this huge file, so work is really complicated now. So what now? Thanks.

[walt.farrell 1,259]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

You will find that discussed many times in the Publisher forums. At this point, linking serves only to notify you when a file you depend on has changed and needs to be manually updated by you, or (with appropriate options set) to automatically update the changed files for you. It does not save file size, and (apparently, as far as we can tell) was not intended to save file size. Serif is aware of our concerns, but we do not know what they might be planning to do about this issue.

[Hud1ai2 2]

Thanks for your answer! I hope, they'll solve this issue asap. Because I hope they didn't developed Publisher as a program for making simply one site prints only. But the difference in sizes is really really big! I don't like waiting on next unexpected program crash during my work caused by size of source file. And next thing is, sending this huge source file to next person.

[Hud1ai2 2]

And next really funny thing. You have file with size 90MB, then you'll remove one image (layer with image) from your project, save it and voilà your file has 96MB  And I've found that even you have absolutely same file without any changes and you save it two times in a row the second file will bigger.

Edited April 16 by Hud1ai2

[dominik 440]

1 hour ago, Hud1ai2 said:

And next really funny thing. You have file with size 90MB, then you'll remove one image (layer with image) from your project, save it and voilà your file has 96MB  And I've found that even you have absolutely same file without any changes and you save it two times in a row the second file will bigger.

Do you perhaps have 'File > Save History' enabled? This could cause a grow of file size even if something is deleted.
Also, what happens when you close the file and 'Save History' is not enabled? If history data gets flushed by closing the file there is a chance that the file size is smaller again.

d.

[walt.farrell 1,259]

The best way to try to shrink the .afpub file after you've been making modifications is, from what I've read, to use Save As and change the file name. That will ensure that Publisher loads the full file into memory and does any needed compaction of space that is no longer used.

[Hud1ai2 2]

Really sophisticated way!