Huge Publisher FIle size and slow working

[Andrew H]

Hi all, 

Here to ask a question I'm hopping somebody can shed some light on. I am creating a 42page report in Affinity Publisher and my file size has increased dramatically to the point it takes half an hour to export to PDF. The program is extremely slow to work on and the saving process takes a huge amount of time. The .afpub file for this document has now in excess of 3gb.

I believe the reason for this is linked .PSD files. Some of these can reach 1-2gb each. Is there support for large sized PSDs or is my best hope to save these as flat images and link them this way? I work in an office environment and a large part of purchasing Affinity Publisher was to reduce duplicate files and shorten the workflow process. Can we expect support in future if the proprietary .PSD file format is the issue? 

Thanks! 

[stokerg]

Hi Andrew H and Welcome to the Forums,

This is a known issue with certain file types, we've had reports of this also happening with PDFs and SVG files, so i'll update the report that PSD files also cause the same issue.  

I'm not aware of a workaround for this issue other than saving a flattened version of the PSD as an image and inserting that  

 

[Joachim_L]

It seems to be be, that all (or most) document file types are increasing the file size, when you able to use the Edit Document button in the context toolbar. Irrelevant if linked or embedded.

[Andrew H]

Thanks for the help everyone!

Going to use a flat .jpeg for the timebeing until the issue is patched. I think part of the issue may be that Affinity Publisher may be accessing the .PSD layers which is causing the large file size and general slowness. It seems strange though as after I have made a save, the program speeds up until another image is edited/updated.

Looking forward to a fix in the future.

[JeanMichel78]

I have a huge issue when exporting to PDF. I make photography magazines. 

The mag is 212 pages. I publish it online with kiosks such as Magzter, MagCloud, and Issuu.

They only accept PDF exported as pages, not spreads. When I export the file as spreads, I get a 94mb file, which is correct. When I export it as pages, I get a 958mb file. 

Do you have any solution for that?

The export settings are Web, 192dpi. Another issue is that if I don't flatten everything, the colors of most of the images are changed, which is not conceivable for a photography magazine.

Can you please make an interactive PDF preset?

Thanks.

[Patrick Connor]

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (Linking certain file types leads to large afpub filesizes) of the program in the latest customer beta. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below.

The latest beta builds are downloadable from links at the top of each of these beta forum posts.

• Affinity Publisher 1.8.0.556 for Windows
• Affinity Publisher 1.8.0.556 for Mac

These betas install parallel, next to the release version (they do not overwrite your release) and so the fixes can be tried in the beta without affecting your normal workflow in the release version.

Once these programs have been through a full beta process the change will be released in a future free 1.8.0 update/patch to all customers.

[Alexander Rutz]

Dear Serif,

I’m afraid this is still an issue in 1.10.4 (Mac). I have a brochure with a mere 36 pages, all images are linked and not embedded. Document size is 1,31 GB, saved via »save as« and no history saved. This does not seem reasonable.

Cheers and all the best,

Alex

[carl123]

In Document > Resource Manager can you estimate the total size of all images (linked or not)?

[Alexander Rutz]

On 1/31/2022 at 11:43 AM, carl123 said:

In Document > Resource Manager can you estimate the total size of all images (linked or not)?

Yes, the size of all linked images is roughly the size of the document.

[carl123]

Windows 11

In a new blank document if I place 10 images (JPGs total size 100MB) my document size is approx 202MB - document was set to embed images

In a new blank document if I place 10 images (JPGs total size 100MB) my document size is approx 3MB - document was set to link images

 

What sort of images are you using (e.g. jpg, pngs, tiff etc)?

A screenshot of your resource panel may also help

Also, do a File > Save as package and look in that folder for any large files not immediately obvious in your document such as fonts used (size) and any discrepancies in total image count/sizes reported etc etc etc