* V7 PDF creation very slow, creating huge files

[MartinB]

Thanks for all the comments everyone. Amazingly retrograde PDF step in V7. The beauty of spending ages capturing family data and adding enhancing text is to be able to print it and use it to communicate with people, family members or otherwise. So, how do I go about escalating this to Calico Pie? It's not an acceptable solution for the majority of users to have to spend more money on system components that should not be needed. It's a huge costly sticking plaster for a self-inflicted wound.

[dewilkinson]

Had a go at creating a much larger report, 470 pages and gave up with pdf production after 30 minutes. rtf production went quite quickly, resultant pdf from Word was 5.5 Mb. I did notice via Task manager that disk read/write was running solidly at 100% all of the time, and in fact 15 minutes later is still at 100% so its clearly moving a lot of data around. Seems to me that there is something fundamentally wrong. Time for another ticket to Calico Pie methinks.

I am now running the same report on my high spec laptop that I use for writing simulations and it is taking just as long.

[ColeValleyGirl]

I wonder why FH is doing anything except presenting formatted text to the relevant PDF printer -- the PDF printer will be doing all the PDF file access, surely?

Laptop, 8Gb memory, old technology disk drive, same 500 page report, no issues.

[ColeValleyGirl]

It's not an acceptable solution for the majority of users to have to spend more money on system components that should not be needed. It's a huge costly sticking plaster for a self-inflicted wound.

They aren't needed -- I get no problems on a slow 8Gb laptop with an old-fashioned hard disk, and on a super-fast 64Gb pc with 2 x M.2 SSDs. It isn't a hardware config issue.

[Mark1834]

My feeling is that the two are related. Another experiment I have run in the past is to generate a large Individual Summary Sheet compilation containing everyone in my ~1000 person main database, leave it open, then repeat with a Family Group Sheet compilation containing all families.

Whichever way around I generate the two reports, FH7 on the PC described above gives up partway through the second report. By contrast FH6 on an old very basic laptop (4 GB RAM, mechanical HDD) manages both, and in a reasonable timescale with relatively little load on the HDD. It seems to manage big data so much more efficiently.

I share ColeValleyGirl’s conclusion - something is broken inside FH7, and upgrading hardware won’t fix it.

[MartinB]

I wonder why FH is doing anything except presenting formatted text to the relevant PDF printer -- the PDF printer will be doing all the PDF file access, surely?

Laptop, 8Gb memory, old technology disk drive, same 500 page report, no issues.

Am I understanding you correctly? Are you saying you don't have a PDF creation problem? Thanks.

[MartinB]

fyi, I've raised a support ticket for my experience. I'll let you know the reply.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Yes, I'm saying I don't have a problem.

I just printed a 1200 page book to PDF on the old slow low-spec laptop without any problems.

Ironically, I never produce PDFs normally...

[MartinB]

Yes, I'm saying I don't have a problem.

I just printed a 1200 page book to PDF on the old slow low-spec laptop without any problems.

Ironically, I never produce PDFs normally...

Thanks. Out of interest (not that I'm too technically orientated) what version of Windows is your old laptop running? I'm wondering if it's a combination of the FH upgrade and Windows 10 causing the problem? (Just guessing of course!).

[ColeValleyGirl]

Windows 10. I doesn't have the latest update though...

[dewilkinson]

My high spec laptop after 40 minutes finally produced a pdf for my 470 page report, a whopping 520mb. Creating the same report via rtf and Word produces a pdf of 5mb, about 1%, the same ratio as I previously observed. I agree with the conclusion that something is broken in FH7 but it maybe in part to which version of Windows is in use. Both my laptops have the most recent Windows 10. Giving up on this now after spending quite a bit of time on it.

[Mark1834]

FH uses 20% of my memory, so about 12Gb.

This still puzzles me. It is not physically possible for a 32-bit app to do this. Do you have some sort of memory manager on your systems that is helping FH7 manage RAM? Perhaps that’s the difference compared with other users?

[RS3100]

I hadn't realised any of this until I read this thread. I'm running FH7 on a Win 8.1 64-bit PC with 16GB of RAM, and I have several different programs that all want to install and use their own PDF printer driver, so I tend to use CutePDF for all of them, including FH.

I just tried printing a 37 page PDF report that I had previously printed from FH6.2. Nothing seems to have been lost or corrupted in the process, but the new FH7 document is 42MB in size, whereas the FH6 copy was just over 3MB. That's a lot of extra data for a document of virtually identical page length and appearance.

[ColeValleyGirl]

FH uses 20% of my memory, so about 12Gb.

This still puzzles me. It is not physically possible for a 32-bit app to do this. Do you have some sort of memory manager on your systems that is helping FH7 manage RAM? Perhaps that’s the difference compared with other users?

My mistake -- it's around about 2Gb when it's the only application running. I'd forgotten what a resource hog Chrome is.

[tatewise]

As is often the case with complex systems ~ some users experience the problems and others do not.
Clearly, there is a problem with FH v7 and PDF production on some user platforms and PDF file size is an issue for all.
Until Calico Pie take an interest and perhaps inspect the platforms with problems then nothing will change.
Perhaps, this is a case where multiple tickets with specific symptoms are worthwhile.

As an example, my updated Export Gedcom File plugin has been used successfully by many users for several weeks.
But yesterday somebody used it on a file path involving Släkt with an accented character, which is represented differently in ANSI and UTF8 and upset the latest plugin despite being Ok with earlier versions of my plugin.
I soon tracked down the bug and it will be fixed in the next published version, but until a problem arises the developer does not know a problem exists, and no matter how many users have no problems it does not mean there are none.

[ColeValleyGirl]

I'm not saying there are no problems, Mike, I'm saying they aren't universal.

[davepacey]

I have just tried to generate a pdf file using a family group report for 1190 famiies on an Intel i5 newish laptop with 8gb ram and 500gb SSD.
Smooth scrolling disabled, the first time, FH just crashed.
Tried a second time, exactly same settings and a report was generated but only a few lines on the page, no text, no images, see screenshot,

This report runs to 1706 pages, If I try this on my higher spec PC, it completes with all the text and images on the first 20 or so pages, the rest missing.
Memory usage at 57%and CPU usage at 2%

Image1.jpg (451.11 KiB) Viewed 5185 times

[Mark1834]

Another observation- I generated a typical Family Group Sheet collection (about 20 pages, with thumbnail source images). Saving as a PDF within FH7 gave a file of 14.7 MB. Saving as an RTF and printing that with MS PDF driver or PDF995 gave files of 2.9 and 3.9 MB, respectively. Saving the RTF file as a PDF in Word gave only 1.2 MB, and quality looked fine. All of these were “as they came”, and I didn’t try to optimise dpi.

I then selected all of the downsampling options within the FH PDF printer, and while file size reduced to a more reasonable 2.1 MB, the quality of the printed text was horrible. It wasn’t just images that were being downsized.

From Dave’s experience above (which mirrors mine during testing), it seems that both report generation and PDF printing are broken in FH7. They may be two different problems though.

[NickiP]

I tried to "save as pdf" a 211 page ancestors by generation narrative report. It spooled to page 124 and then completely locked up my laptop and I had to power off/on to get any response. I've exported this previously, albeit that its a little larger than when previously exported, but never had an issue. I should also say that my laptop is still Win10 1709 with 8gb RAM and an SSD so not very high powered these days as its 8 years old.

I also use CutePDF Writer software so "printed" a copy of the same report. It took 1 hour 50 minutes to complete, all text and images visible but it is 290mb in size. Some sources have images in them but not that large a percentage. When I exported to rtf the same report was 34mb in size. However that throws out all the images (as it has always done), not just different positions but size etc, so its not useable if I want images in the narrative reports.

As has already been said, there is definitely something not working properly with the report writer and pdf printing. I'll also raise a support ticket to try and add weight to the issue.

[Andy63]

Something is definitely going wrong. I did several tries and only managed to build a report if I added a hundred individuals at a time to get around 3,000 otherwise the software freezes (0% CPU), can't even get to the View part.

When I accumulate the individuals with Edit, I can get thru the process. I tried with Save As and Adobe Acrobat driver, all pages are blank in my case.

It is not a problem of memory, nor speed, nor hard disk, nor pdf drivers. The software uses about 15% of the processor and a maximum of 700mb during the calculations when creating the View of around 3,000 pages and almost nothing on the hard disk. Besides, Windows works very well with 8Gb RAM, it is designed for that.

At first I tried with the full database, 98,860 individuals. Before crashing, I had alerts with some plugin errors. It didn't last too long.

Andy

[MartinB]

Thanks to everyone for sharing their experiences. All sounds familiar and quite dispiriting. I'm awaiting a proper response to my ticket, raised on 28th Dec. (I've only had an acknowledgement stating that CP will investigate). If anyone else gets a substantive reply, please post it here. Thanks.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Given that it's the holiday season, I wouldn't expect anything substantive before the New Year!

[dewilkinson]

I raised a ticket a couple of days ago and had the acknowledgement. I suspect it will be while before we hear anything and hopefully Calico Pie have realised that there are a number of issues with reporting and the credibility of FH is being damaged.

[MartinB]

Last Friday I asked Calico Pie if there was any progress on this issue and today they said they are investigating it but there is no news to report and that they are very busy with [issues on] the new release. I'll ask again in a couple of weeks. In the meanwhile I've stopped using FH!

[AdrianBruce]

I've never written any code to put a file of text and images into a PDF so I have no idea what is required. Therefore I'm speculating - well, worrying really...

If you need to wrap the text and other objects in "commands" to create a PDF with text and embedded images (as distinct from a PDF that is an image of each page), then is it possible that the new "rich text" reports have exceeded the capabilities of the PDF print driver that FH uses???

After all, as I now realise, it's been impossible to save a faithful copy of a report containing images as an RTF file for some time (impossible in v6, eg). Is it possible there are similar limits in PDF creation? I've no idea, so I'm not assuming that it's a simple on/off setting for image or not. I wish it was but...