Out of memory in Xara Desginer Pro X10

[olledahl]

I have made a poster (100cm x 120cm) and it looks fine. But when I export it to PDF I get the message "Out Of Memory".

I have tried to reduce it to 50% but I get the same message.

Since the poster is kind of big I have chosen 300 dpi - and I know that's a lot.
Tried saving under new name - but the error occurs again.
Tried different settings when exporting - same error.
I have at least 20 GB free space on the hard disc.

I am running XDPX10 and earlier today I upgraded to the latest version dated Aug. 8th 2014.

Does anyone know what I can do to export the file to PDF without this error?

Thanks!

Olle in Sweden

[gwpriester]

Hi Olle

Maybe Mike will have an answer when he checks in.

Also, are you printing the poster or are you having the poster printed by a printing company? Maybe they do not need such a high resolution. Have you asked them?

Another thought is to prepare a full size JPEG with the normal compression.

But wait for Mike to check in. This is his area of expertise.

[olledahl]

Hi Gary,

What I did was this...
I opened the file, changed all text to "Join shapes" and made bitmap (PNG 300 dpi) copies of all the graphics.
Then it worked. The result came out as a 21 MB PDF-file and it looks like it will work when printed.
The thing is that the company that will print the banner does not work with printouts etc. They are just a company that happens to have a huge large format printer...

But I have a back up with a company that works professionally with print outs and if the first one does not work, I will turn to them for help ;-)

I am looking forward to hear what Mike has to say, as it might be a bug.

And... I did the changes in v.9 and has not been able to try it out in v.10.

/Olle in Sweden

[mwenz]

I don't have version X10. Without at least a screen shot of the it would be hard to say anything of value. Even then it would probably take having a copy of the file to work with to begin being able to understand why it was failing.

With large dimension files, I have also often made bitmap copies of certain features rather than keep them live, such as contoured items, item with drop shadows, etc., and saved to a new file for output. Text I usually keep as live text.

Your dimensions are not very large in the scheme of things and am surprised that all this was needed.

Sorry I cannot really help and am glad you found a means to produce the PDF.

Take care, Mike

[Acorn]

I have made a poster (100cm x 120cm) and it looks fine. But when I export it to PDF I get the message "Out Of Memory".

I have tried to reduce it to 50% but I get the same message.

Since the poster is kind of big I have chosen 300 dpi - and I know that's a lot.
Tried saving under new name - but the error occurs again.
Tried different settings when exporting - same error.
I have at least 20 GB free space on the hard disc.

I am running XDPX10 and earlier today I upgraded to the latest version dated Aug. 8th 2014.

Does anyone know what I can do to export the file to PDF without this error?

Thanks!

Olle in Sweden

Olle, the out of memory is probably where you do not have enough RAM available.
You will need to close all other applications, other than the Xara one, and try again.
I keep Window's Task Manager open on Processes and have it ordered by Memory so i can watch the memory being eaten up.

Acorn

[mwenz]

When I have gotten the (very) few out of memory errors I have experienced, and cared to look at Task Manager, rarely has total memory risen above 65%. It's not a good indicator. Most of the time when people have experienced this when generating PDFs and have provided the file, I have successfully used a laptop with only 4 gigs of memory to produce said PDF.

the few times I have gotten them, it was on very large dimension files...ones at the max size and have had bitmaps that covered the entire background. The solution for those times was to edit the background bitmap in a bitmap editor and dividing the background into 3 or 4 pieces, importing them back into XDP and aligning them so as to not see the edges.

The total bitmap usage in those files are exactly the same. In these cases, I think XDP chokes when trying to process a single bitmap that is of the combined dimensions rather than actually using up all available memory.

[handrawn]

out of memory means out of the ram/pagefil that has been allocated that it can access - what is allocated to it by windows and what it calls for and is able to reserve

so lots of other foreground/background prgrams/processes is not going to help generally speaking

I'm inclined to agree wit Mike about the large bitmap - splitting one task that requires a lot of memory into four tasks, that can be run sequentially at a lower memory load, makes sense