Limits of a .xar documents

[ernie-f]

Can please anyone give me answers to the following questions:

1. where is the physical memory limit of a .xar document?

2. is there a page limit in the .xar document?

3. is it possible to realize an A4 project (print) with 400, 800 or even 1000 pages with Xara?

4. if yes, what about the performance?

5. in my project there will be about 1500 pictures with 300 ppi resolution. I once read somewhere Xara can only use 1.6 GB RAM for the output, then Xara stops. Is that true? If yes then Xara will be excluded from this project.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any answers neither in the forum nor on the web. I don't have the time and desire to test it and start it over in another program. If someone reads from Xara here, it would be great if you could show the limits of the software and the .xar document files.

Thank you in advance
Ernie

[Acorn]

Can please anyone give me answers to the following questions:

1. where is the physical memory limit of a .xar document?
2. is there a page limit in the .xar document?
3. is it possible to realize an A4 project (print) with 400, 800 or even 1000 pages with Xara?
4. if yes, what about the performance?
5. in my project there will be about 1500 pictures with 300 ppi resolution. I once read somewhere Xara can only use 1.6 GB RAM for the output, then Xara stops. Is that true? If yes then Xara will be excluded from this project.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any answers neither in the forum nor on the web. I don't have the time and desire to test it and start it over in another program. If someone reads from Xara here, it would be great if you could show the limits of the software and the .xar document files.
Thank you in advance
Ernie

Ernie, my opinion:

1. None I have found so assume whatever your device can supply.
2. None I have found.
3. Yes.
4. Performance might require you adjusting the OS Virtual memory. I have found inserts, deletes and moves of text or pages to be adequate.
5. Never come across such a limit. For these images, I would not embed them directly into the Xara document, I would use a Placeholder.

Acorn

[ernie-f]

Hi Acorn,
thanks for the quick answer.
The idea with the placeholder is good, but then I loose the flexibility of editing inside Xara.

[handrawn]

regarding 5 - that might have been a 32bit limit...

[ernie-f]

regarding 5 - that might have been a 32bit limit...

I thought so too. I'll just try.

@Acorn: the placeholder thing is not practical. If you generate a preview it will take forever until Xara has rendered it. Without it you quickly lose the overview.

Here is a screenshot of how my manuscript looks like.



This is my first test in Xara to give them a clear direction. And this on approx. 1000 pages!

[Acorn]

ernie, then make sure your images are on an image layer that is normally hidden. This will improve rendering speed and when you are working or a specific page you can unhide that page.

The nice thing is you do not need to unhide the images when exporting to PDF. I assume this is for print as you specify 300dpi. You can ensure hidden layers are published.

If you are printing, you can always split your document into small sets of 50 pages each. You can then assemble the final output into one large PDF with one of the many PDF utilities available.

Acorn

[ernie-f]

ernie, then make sure your images are on an image layer that is normally hidden. This will improve rendering speed and when you are working or a specific page you can unhide that page.

The nice thing is you do not need to unhide the images when exporting to PDF. I assume this is for print as you specify 300dpi. You can ensure hidden layers are published.

If you are printing, you can always split your document into small sets of 50 pages each. You can then assemble the final output into one large PDF with one of the many PDF utilities available.

Acorn

Again thx for You affort to help me.

The splitting think I'd thought about too.

The problem is, I need a continous textflow with ankered images. Because the autor will make, after the book is set, some changes in text and or some more annotations.

I know, I better do this in one of my Laoutprograms but I will try to do this in Xara.

To merge the outputed PDF-pieces is no problem, I must still load the PDF into Acrobat Pro to correct the color profile to gray. Xara can't handle grayscales. All outputed grayscale images will be handled like RGB.

An other reason to do this in Xara is that I can edit the brightnes and/or contrast of each image inside. In Indesign I have a transfer to PS. Angry that I haven't upgraded my subscription for Adobe CC. And I'm not willing to do it again.

Affinity Publisher is still in beta and has not the posibility to anker or embed graphics/images.

A simillar project I realized with TangoSolo, a German Publishing Software. Faulty is the PDF-Output via Destiller and the printing house makes trouble with this generated PDF's. They say no more! And I must work with them.

If I can't handle tis in Xara so I try it in PagePlus or CorelDraw. Another option is Scribus, but not my favorit.

When I get the corrected texts I'll try to set 100 or more Pages with Xara. The expirience I'll share here on TG.

Keep your fingers crossed
Ernie

[Acorn]

Acorn

[ernie-f]

Thx Acorn.
And if not then we are in Bavaria so we have alternatives:

[Rob-Xar]

Xara doesn't perform super well on documents with a very large number of pages (content dependant, 1000 pages of text is easier to handle than say 500 pages of images). It's a known performance issue on the list to improve but there's no hard limit on the number of pages you can have in a document. Doesn't come up very often though as the majority of documents I see are less than 100 pages.

As far as memory limits go it's all system dependant. If your on a 32bit system it's 3.5Gb, on 64bit I think it's something huge like 192gb. You can go to File > Document information to see roughly the memory usage of the document.

Thanks
Rob