[CS5][JS] Efficiently export 100+ page book as PDF?

[Guest]

Hello,

I'm creating an InDesign Book via javascript, and this book will contain more than 100 single page InDesign Documents. My script to create the book works fine - but takes anywhere from 5-8 minutes to run.

However, when I run my script to open that book and export as a PDF, it takes 10+ minutes just to export the PDF, and then it times out on our InDesign Development server. I'm wondering if I can more efficiently write my script to create the book, as well as my script to export the book as a PDF. Both scripts are very simple:

CreateInDesignBook();

function CreateInDesignBook(){

    var myBook = app.books.add('c:/myBook.indb');

    myBook.bookContents.add('file_1.indd');

    myBook.bookContents.add('file_2.indd');

    // and so on, with potentially 100-200 more .indd files added

    myBook.close(SaveOptions.YES);

}

--------------------------------------------------

ExportInDesignBook();

function ExportInDesignBook(){

    var myBook = app.open('c:/myBook.indb');

    var myFile = new File('myPDF.pdf');

    myBook.exportFile(ExportFormat.pdfType, myFile, false, app.pdfExportPresets.item('[Smallest File Size]'));

    myBook.close(SaveOptions.NO);

}

Thanks in advance for any help/advice!

-Lloyd

[Guest]

As for creating my book, I have found that if I create the single Indesign pages (each contain a page-size PDF) in increments of 50 pages per document (so could have 3 documents of 50 pages each getting added to my book), the books are created MUCH faster (less than a minute). However, exporting that book as a PDF still took roughly 11 minutes.

Does anyone know if there is a faster way to export this? I'm just trying to avoid time-outs on the server. Is there a way I could add pages/documents to an existing PDF (instead of exporting the entire book/document as one PDF)? If that were the case I could just add 50 pages at a time to the PDF and maybe not even need the book anymore?

Ultimately, I just need an efficient way to get all pages into a single PDF.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Laubender]

Ihanneman,

if you use Acrobat 9 Pro you easily can combine all your PDFs into one file. Go to:

File / Combine / Merge Files into a Single PDF

If you use Acrobat X Pro go to:

File / Create / Combine Files into a Single PDF

From then on it's quite self-explanatory…

Uwe

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply!

I think I read something about using Acrobat as well, however, I'll need a way to automate this using InDesign Server and scripting, so Acrobat won't be an option.

[absqua]

Do your pages contain anything but a page-size pdf? If not—if your goal is simply to combine single-page pdfs into a larger, multi-page pdf—why use InDesign at all?

I don't know what your workflow looks like, but on Mac/*nix, I would use something like pdftk for this.

I assume there's some way to run a command-line program from VBScript? I don't know. If there is, and if your pages contain InDesign content as well as placed pdfs, you could export each page/document to pdf, and then combine the new pdfs with your existing multi-page pdf by shelling out to pdftk or something similar.

Jeff

[Guest]

Correct, nothing but a single PDF on each page. However, the pages are originally built with InDesign because several pages might contain multiple PDFs, then each page is exported as a single PDF. Then when we have our "page" PDFs they can be arranged and brought back into InDesign to make a book. Our entired workflow revolves around InDesign/InDesign server, thats why I'm using our ID Server to export the PDFs via javascript - it's just a little slow!

[Laubender]

Ihanneman,

why not expanding the time-out of your server?

Uwe

[Guest]

My solution to this is to create my single page documents in increments of 25. So for 100 pages, I'll have 4 documents. These can be added to a book much faster, and the export also seems much quicker!