Combining PDFs - The Blazing Fast Method

[FileMaker Magazine]

by Matt Petrowsky

29

[Bart]

Hi, Matt -

I looked forward to reading and viewing your new article concerning combined PDFs and how they can be more quickly generated in Filemaker Pro. Unfortunately, while your presentation is terrific, the technique still doesn't accomplish what I needed to work on a client solution I've been working with for almost eight months now. I wanted to give your demo a workout so I set up two tables one for each pdf page and made the content of each page a container field the entire size of the page. I filled them with image files of approximately 250Kb each, and then I created 100 records in each table. The resultant Combined.pdf comes out to be about 76 MB in size.

While the page content is not complicated (as many of mine are) each includes a fairly large jpg (which many of mine do also when used as form backgrounds). It took almost 8 minutes to create the Combined.pdf changing your Save Records as PDF from Current Record to records Being Browsed. The slowdown happens within Filemaker Pro as it tries to create a pdf of one record per page. It is intolerably slow. Combine that with the subsequent appending of a second, equally large and slow to build pdf file.

In my mind, there's really only one way to do this. That is, take the data out of Filemaker and put it into the hands of parsing engine run by Java or some other code base where pdfs can be written with whatever formatting is required within, say, the Java app and merged with data exported via XML, tab, or csv, etc., format from Filemaker Pro. That's how we're doing it now and it works very well and is very very fast compared to allowing Filemaker Pro to do the pdf formatting. For example, we can take say 200 separate records, each with a number of complex related fields, calculated (some unstored), and summary fields, and export them, make a commandline call to the Java app and then have it find the export, parse it, and write out one pdf with 200 pages (or more if some of the records require more than one page) in approximately 15-20 seconds after the time it takes to construct and process the export itself.

I suspect that this is the result of all the gobbledy-gook that Adobe required of Filemaker when it licensed them to use the PDF engine. There's just too much crud in there to run quickly, whereas other open source PDF writers around can be and usually are a lot quicker because they only have just enough in them to do the job. At least that would make some sense.

Anyway, I applaud this approach you've illustrated, I just wished it worked a lot faster in the areas I need it to.