Family Historian User Group

Hello, anyone else had a problem printing their books and reports after upgrading to v7? If so, how did you fix it?
Problem: I upgraded very recently from v6 to v7 - all went well. I thought I'd check that my (only) Book would print OK. In V6 the book printed to PDF fairly quickly and had a file size of lass than 1 Mb. PDF printing in V7 grinds away for minutes preparing the file and eventually produces a file of 318 Mb! The book is not set up to print graphics of any sort it's all text: pages that I wrote plus Individual Narratives.
[A side effect of the upgrade is that the number of pages in the book has reduced from146 to 130 but I think that's due to the 'deleted paragraphs' feature mentioned elsewhere, so I'm not worried about that].
Possible solutions: I've tried reinstalling FHNovapdf7.7.400.exe and FH V7 itself but it didn't make any difference. Same thing happens with printing to MS PDF.
Any thoughts anyone? Many thanks in advance.

I have given up trying to use the reporting option in V7, I have kept v6 on an old laptop, or I use Heredis.

For me, with V7, I end up with memory errors (I have 16gb on a high spec Intel i7 computer) I have missing photos, blank pages, FH sometimes quits altogether. If it wasn't for the other improvements, I would not have upgraded.


Luckily, my reporting requirements are limited, so I can manage.

Could you try disabling smooth scrolling on the General tab of the preferences dialogue and report back?

davepacey wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 09:23

I have given up trying to use the reporting option in V7, I have kept v6 on an old laptop, or I use Heredis.

For me, with V7, I end up with memory errors (I have 16gb on a high spec Intel i7 computer) I have missing photos, blank pages, FH sometimes quits altogether. If it wasn't for the other improvements, I would not have upgraded.


Luckily, my reporting requirements are limited, so I can manage.

I find it strange that I cannot see any other problems reported with PDF printing in V7 in the UG posts. I was hoping it was just me. I'm going to see if there is a way to improve printing in FH as I don't want to have a different solution. Thanks for the observation.

Have you tried disabling smooth scrolling?

ColeValleyGirl wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 09:52

Could you try disabling smart scrolling on the General tab of the preferences dialogue and report back?

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried this, no good I'm afraid. Perhaps worse than before. I've had to re-start my laptop a couple of times now caused by trying to print to PDF. [It was 'smooth' scrolling, just for the record].

ColeValleyGirl wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 10:54

Have you tried disabling smart scrolling?

Took a while to reply because everything just grinds so slowly and the laptop crashes! Thanks for following up.

Whoops -- corrected. It would probably have more impact for people who have graphics in their reports, as would changing the DPI for graphics ("Diagram/Report Image DPI (max)" setting under Advanced in the General tab of Preferences. (Putting this here in case it helps somebody else).

Calico Pie have radically changed the way Books & Reports are produced in FH V7 by using 'current Microsoft technology' that offers increased functionality. However, the side effect is that PDF reporting is very much slower and appears to be unreliable, which is why there are settings to adjust.
For me, I cannot produce PDF Books or Reports at all and only get headers & footers with otherwise blank pages.
So, Martin, you are not alone.

PDF production in FH7 is broken. As well as large files, slow generation, and even occasional crashes, text corruption is also an issue that I have observed, even in relatively small reports.

I have given up on it, and always output to RTF, which I load into Word and generate the PDF using the Microsoft PDF printer.

I have tried disabling smooth scrolling, it makes no difference, It all worked fine in V6, Whatever CP have done has broken it in V7.

My guess is that this is memory related -- how much memory does everybody's PC have? I have 64Gb and no problems whatsoever -- just generated a 500 page PDF (247Mb) including source thumbnails -- slow but it delivers.

ColeValleyGirl wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 12:08

My guess is that this is memory related -- how much memory does everybody's PC have? I have 64Gb and no problems whatsoever -- just generated a 500 page PDF (247Mb) including source thumbnails -- slow but it delivers.

64GB wow ! I cant see many other people having that much.

I have 16GB that should be ample, I have a high spec PC that I use for video and photograph editing, I can use all my other apps without issue, including the Adobe suite.

davepacey wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 12:18

64GB wow ! I cant see many other people having that much.

It added £140 to the cost of the PC earlier this year, and I reckoned it was worth it -- Microsoft tend to assume that everyone has unlimited memory, after all.

ColeValleyGirl wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 12:25

davepacey wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 12:18

64GB wow ! I cant see many other people having that much.

It added £140 to the cost of the PC earlier this year, and I reckoned it was worth it -- Microsoft tend to assume that everyone has unlimited memory, after all.

£140 is cheap for 64GB

Not many programs would utilise that amount of memory but its better than not having enough. I may upgrade mine to 32gb but a check on memory usage, even when V7 is telling me I am short of memory, tells me that only around half of mine is being used.

It should not significantly matter how much RAM as it just means there is more Page Swapping to disk which is probably SSD these days. Anyway, the comparisons are often being done between similar spec PC running FH V6 versus FH V7, and FH V7 is much much slower if it works at all.

tatewise wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 13:04

It should not significantly matter how much RAM as it just means there is more Page Swapping to disk which is probably SSD these days. Anyway, the comparisons are often being done between similar spec PC running FH V6 versus FH V7, and FH V7 is much much slower if it works at all.

Exactly !

Just tried a few examples, no issues generating pdfs other than the known <para><br> issues. But a very large pdf file created for 13 pages with one small image, 15mb. Saved the same report as a rft file, loaded into Word, saved as a pdf, size 0.15Mb which about what I would expect, i.e.1% of the FH7 generated pdf.

dewilkinson wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 13:12

Just tried a few examples, no issues generating pdfs other than the known <para><br> issues. But a very large pdf file created for 13 pages with one small image, 15mb. Saved the same report as a rft file, loaded into Word, saved as a pdf, size 0.15Mb which about what I would expect, i.e.1% of the FH7 generated pdf.

Have you tried creating a large file?

I can create a PDF file with a hundred or so pages without a problem, but again, that is a small file. I have almost 6000 people in my file, if I want to create a book using most of them, there is no chance whatsoever, but in V6 I can, that is the problem.

tatewise wrote: ↑

28 Dec 2020 13:04

It should not significantly matter how much RAM as it just means there is more Page Swapping to disk which is probably SSD these days.

Or M.2 SSD...

FH7 generating a PDF isn't appreciably slower than FH6 on my PC. While it's doing so FH uses 20% of my memory, so about 12Gb. I presume this is because it isn't paging at all.

So it would seem the true cost of ownership of FH V7 is near to £200 or over £300 if on two PC!

When I have a moment I'll try it on my laptop which is nowhere near as highly configured.

I’ve tried generating large reports in the past with FH7, and even with a reasonable spec PC (i5 CPU, 8 GB RAM and M2 SSD), it spent a long time (many minutes) with the SSD at 100% load, as monitored in Task Manager. Given that M2 disks can write at over a GB per second, that’s a lot of data being moved around!

Remember that FH itself is only a 32-bit app, so cannot use more than about 3 GB of RAM, however much is installed.

Is the PDF app 32 or 64 bit? I'm going to guess the Microsoft Print to PDF is 64bit on a 64bit Windows installation.

It is installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Calico Pie\Family Historian PDF so is 32-bit like FH.

But the discussion revolves around very large PDF files rather than working RAM.
So presumably involves a lot of disk access to the PDF file.
Calico Pie were asked about the new features surrounding PDF creation and apart from talking about 'modern Microsoft technology' did not go into any details. I wish they were a bit more open about how it works and what the benefits are as plenty of users are not seeing any benefits.