Speed up pdf creation ?

[FrameMaker-dk]

I create a lot of pdf's from books. Mainly the book files consists of pages with pdf files referenced in. The pdf's are big even though they have been saved as optimised. I use the function "print to pdf" and it works fine. But very slow. I suspect it is slow because the pdf graphics are complicated cad drawings. I really really wish there was a way to make Framemaker use the computers full power. There are 8 kernels and heaps of ram, but it seems the printing process can only run on one processor. Is it not possible to use some "magic" and make the printing process faster?

regards

Bjørn

[Bob_Niland]

SSD (Solid State Disk) might help. Extra CPU cores won't because the whole Print-to/Save-as PDF process is probably single-threaded.

You might try Print-to-Postscript and Distill (if you have the full Acrobat [Pro] product). If the results are satisfactory, just print to a "watched directory" that Distiller will find. This returns control to FM as soon as the .ps file is written.

And get an SSD.

[FrameMaker-dk]

Hi

Thanks for the answers. I am already running ssd, but the option using "print to file" does get me some ekstra time because it sets FrameMaker free when the ps file is written. The entire process takes the same time whether writing directly to pdf or using ps+distiller. I took a stopwatch to the task 🙂

But I really wish it was possible to make the process make better use of the computers processing power. It seem photoshop is able to spread itself across processors - but FrameMaker is not. Is this a question of programming the software or can one insert some sort of software which manages the computing process better? Maybe dumb questions but that's how far my wisdom reaches as of now 😉

best regards

Bjørn

[Bob_Niland]

> But I really wish it was possible to make the process make better use of  the computers processing power.

What you're asking for is a major re-write of FM, and if that were a possibility, the user base here might have higher priorities than rendering time. Of course, spIntel told us when they introduced the Itanium processor in the mid 90's that we were supposed to get automagic parallelizing compilers that would make almost anything multi-threaded. Never happened, probably never will. Itanic is all but dead now, and FM never ran on it anyway.

> It seem photoshop is able to spread  itself across processors ...

That because many transforms can be applied to fragments of an image, and/or to separate layers independently.

> - but FrameMaker is not.

The rendering process generates either an implicit (.tps) or explicit (.ps) PostScript file, which is a giant monolithic serial text stream (the source code of a programming language, actually). It is not easily susceptible to being done in parallel bits (although being done as N separate pages might be a way, later merged into a single PDF).

> Is this a question of  programming the software ...

Even before that, it's a question of whether the task can even be parallelized. Framemaker's ostensible competitor, by the way, seems to have the same problem.

> ... or can one insert some sort of software which  manages the computing process better?

Print-to-Ps & separately Distill is your best bet after you've done everything else to speed up the hardware:

+ at least 2 cores (so FM isn't sharing one with housekeeping),
+ fast basic clock rate (4GHz+),

+ gobs of RAM (8-16 GB) so no VM swapping,
+ SSD (for OS, temp, app and user data file paths - avoid networked files),

+ 64-bit OS (for efficient memory management).

If you have an Intel CPU (rather than an AMD), and it has HyperThreading, turn it off. Hypethreading makes one core pretend to be 2, and often reduces performance of single-threaded tasks. You may need to get into BIOS/EFI to turn it off.

Use any spare real cores for Angry Birds while you wait for the PDF.

______

One nice thing about being stuck on an old Unix FM, with a site license, is that we can have multiple independent instances of FM running at once, in the same workspace or multiple workspaces. It's common to be editing one document while another renders. I suspect that either/both Windows and the FM license on Windows, won't support this.

[Arnis Gubins]

If you're just creating the PDFs for printing, then going the print route as Error suggests would speed things up. The SaveAsPDF route invokes a few post-ps creation routines that are run before handing off to Distiller (or the PDFCreator in the FM only version without Acrobat) where FM spends a fair bit of time before control is passed back. These can be disabled in the maker.ini.