book and magazine export pdf multi page

[Albacore]

It is a big ask of any programme to export a 50 page doc. as PDF. Look how Adobe AI handles it up to CS3 you can only open 1 page at a time and the files are so large for print when saving them as a PDF. As Steve has stated there are easy ways around the problem and it just requires a bit of planing and the problem is solved. Most folk use Acro to assemble their PDF's for printing it is what the programme was built for.

[James Loudon]

I came across the same thing last year. In the end I gave up and bought Serif Page Plus and its a very capable program for multi page documents. Yes, you can export from X as single PDFs and reassemble, but if you plan to be doing a lot of this then its better to get the right tool for the job. PagePlus does what InDesign does more or less at a reasonable price.
Cheers

[Tallis]

Well, microsoft word can handle that many pages, and so can power point. I know, I know, text is different, but each program is solving a different specialty. So if Xara is supposed to be good at graphics, and "much faster" as all the intro videos point out, shouldn't it be a priority to fix this cross-version problem, or/and rewrite in 64bit?

Why is 100 or more web pages "so bit"? I'd imagine IBM's website has thousands or maybe 10's of thousands of product, company, and reference pages. Obviously they would choose Xara to take over that job, just talking about the number here. Every visitor is looking for something different.

It's the 90's, not the 80's here, and the era of RAM and processors! Xara should be more stable in the area of large page count/file size considering it's claims. Just one person's opinion.

OK, it's the 2000s. My just wife likes the 90's still....

[steve.ledger]

I'd imagine IBM's website has thousands or maybe 10's of thousands of product, company, and reference pages.

And all generated on the fly 'server-side' from a huge database and costing many many thousands of dollars more than Xara Web Designer to put into place.
Not a realistic argument what-so-ever.

[Tallis]

Which is precisely why I said

"Obviously they would choose Xara to take over that job"

( I realize now that of course it's a typo-- wouldn't)

[EJ]

Hi Tallis,
I think Sledger has summarised things pretty well. In my experience:

First.Yes, Xara can be a DTP program for small publications. What do I mean by small? Less than 50 pages and less still if the work is intensely graphics rich. Sure, there are examples of books with more than 50 pages being made in Xara. An example is Slrobinsons Flatland.pdf (453KB) which is available at the thread "Anyone Using Xara for Creating Books" Post 19 of the thread in September 2007. But these are few and far between. If anyone has produced a bigger book then let us all know. Flatland is not graphics rich though it is a three column work and it has page numbers.

If you want to go to a medium sized (say 50 to 200 pages) to large works then you will be driven sooner or later to a real word processing or DTP program. You will possibly need footnotes or endnotes, page numbers and styles and you will be changing them-they need to be active. Xara will not do these, nor will it do the hard things like automatic preparation of contents lists, figure numbering and lists and the multitude of other things that medium sized publications need.

Second. PDF programs have become much more capable in the last few years. There was a stage not so long ago when making a pdf of a book of say 150 pages with 150 photographs and 50 maps involved making small pdf chunks of about 20-30 pages, sometimes individual chapters, naming them, storing them, getting them in order and then stitching them together. The process was time-consuming and prone to giving your machine plenty of opportunities to stall, choke on a chapter because you made it to ambitious and then had to restart, or reboot. etc etc. All of this meant that you did not produce proof versions to get an overall look at how the publication was going and this meant that nasty surprises sometimes came out at a later stage.

Now pdf production is better. There are even free print pdf programs which will happily chomp through 150 pages of graphics rich text in one hit and produce a 600 dpi colour pdf ready to print in about 15 minutes. I know this because I am routinely doing it with a book in Word at the moment.

Will they work with Xara? I am not sure because I have not made a book of this size in Xara. However, I have produced 10 page pdfs with these programs in Xara, though Xara can do that by itself anyway. I do know that Xara has trouble importing medium sized pdf files. You can import the Flatland pdf but it takes a while and I would think that anything much bigger might give it indigestion. Flatland is only 450 KB. This is a small pdf but it takes a while to import.

To get a feel for any problems with graphics I imported a small pdf with diagrams. The pdf is called "cave detection in limestone using ground penetrating radar" It is 235 KB, 9 page paper with diagrams etc and is available on the net. It imported readily and Xara produced a print quality pdf (8 MB) after a couple of minutes while a print pdf program produced the same (3 MB) from Xara in less than a minute.

I have tried to import a couple of pdfs around 1 MB into Xara but my machine choked or more accurately I ran out of patience, so I cannot say how such a file would export. Again I'd be interested in other peoples experiences here. And I do not have any Xara files which are that size.

By contrast my book in Word has 1 MB of text linked to 230 photos and 47 maps (Xara produced). There are no problems in producing a print quality pdf of 50-100 MB.

Erik