framemaker 2015 Save as pdf takes lot of time. 150 pages document took ~8 hours. Any solution to this?

[shripadcd]

Well the 150 pages document is a complete User manual having about 50 images scattered through out the manual.

While PDF generation is going on, CPU load is about 50% and RAM usage is about 5 GB out of 8 GB.

Similar looking document in FM 2011 of same length takes about 1.5-2 hours on same machine.

Is there anything wrong in FM 2015? We cannot ask for a favor from client any more. 

Please suggest a solution. Thanks in advance.

[Hezy A]

I have made many PDFs and not experienced that time length.

Can you try printing to the PDF as a printer, or creating a post script file and distilling to see if this improves?

[shripadcd]

Hi Zippy21​

Thanks for quick response.

I tried print as option but it takes similar kind of time.

I will try printing PS file and update.

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

Can you give some more information?

Do you have a book? How many files in the book?

What's the file size of the single files?

What is the graphics file format? What's the file size of the graphics files?

How are the graphics imported? Referenced or copied or as objects?

Best regards

Winfried

[shripadcd]

Thanks Winfried Reng​

Here are details as requested -

Do you have a book? - Yes

How many files in the book? - 10 topics, so 10 files

What's the file size of the single files? - Two big files of 300kb each, others ranging between 60-90kb each

What is the graphics file format? - .JPG

What's the file size of the graphics files? - Ranging between 500kb-1mb each. Approx. 50 images (each image res. 1920x1080 px)

How are the graphics imported? - Imported in a graphics frame

Referenced or copied or as objects? - By reference

Hope this helps. Please let me know if any further info required.

[Hezy A]

This does sound quite unusual.

As it is not supposed to happen.

Do other Frame files work OK?

check

in PDF setup

In the links tab

Is Create Named Destinations for all Paragraphs checked?

This is an option that makes creating the PDF take a long time. so you should uncheck it

Also

I would suggest trying to make a PDF of each file separately, to see if there is a problem in a specific file.

[shripadcd]

We face same issue in all FM 2015 files.

PDF setup - Is Create Named Destinations for all Paragraphs checked? this is unchecked.

Will try to create each file as separate file and let you know.

[Bob_Niland]

Also make sure that Tag Everything for Color Management is not selected in the PDF workflow.

How large are the resulting PDFs?

What is the machine, and what disk?
If still using a rotating rust drive, upgrading to an SSD would help substantially.

A faster CPU would also help, but more cores probably wouldn't (per se), as I doubt Adobe has done much to parallelize the FM workflow. More cores would enable other simultaneous uses of the machine.

Installing a trial copy of FM2019 on some other machine would settle the issue of whether an upgrade would help.

[shripadcd]

Hi @Bob Niland,

Well, the computer is quite old

AMD C2D 3.10 GHz x64

4GB RAM and on board graphics.

May be I'm expecting too much from this computer. Will try the software on new computer.

And I will ensure Tag Everything for Color Management is not selected in the PDF workflow.

[Bob_Niland]

re: AMD C2D 3.10 GHz x64

That's adequate. Per-core performance of x86-64 CPUs hasn't really changed that much since clocks hit the wall in 2002, and older FM versions are only going to fully use 1 core. Memory bandwidth is up a bit, but latency hasn't really improved much (CAS delay keeps rising).

re: 4GB RAM and on board graphics.

The integrated (APU) graphics would steal ¼ to a full GB of that, depending on how the BIOS or EFI is setup, so you might be running with as little as 3GB. If, during the render, the size of the data objects gets near that large, you'll get into swapping, which would slow you down even with an SSD, but definitely with an HDD.

Depending on the hardware and the budget, and if you are on 64-bit Windows, you could try just adding some RAM. As it happens, I'm rebuilding an an older AMD APU machine right now (HD8750). Adding 4GB was a mere US$15 due to being DDR2 (evidently remaindered new-in-box DIMMs).

Next tweak would be migrating from HDD to SSD. I had an SSD on hand from another build. Pretty peppy machine.

Aside - This is going to be a Linux machine (Debian), so if I migrate FM to it, it will be under Wine or similar. This is all merely planning for a post-Microsoft computing environment at my house, once Windows 7 goes off support (I have no plan to ever use Win10). Adobe needs to have a post-Microsoft plan too☺. At the very least offer FM as a cloud service.

[Barb Binder]

Hi shripadcd:

Is upgrading to 2019 an option? The PDF conversion was dramatically improved and I was amazed by how much faster PDF generation is for long books.

If you have time, you might download the free trial and just test it out. Even if your office is saying no now, you might be able to justify the upgrade if you see a significant time savings.

~Barb

[shripadcd]

Thanks BarbBinder​

Guess, there is no way out. Will try out 2019 some time in the next week.