[reportlab-users] Numerous pdfs generation

[Andy Robinson]

2009/1/9 Fabian <fbs at tinyerp.com>:

>

> Yes, it's the 6M pages a day.


Have you actually done some experiments and looked at the resulting
file sizes, and/or run out of memory?    What limits do you hit?

I presume that these are stacks of highly similar documents - for
example a big stack of invoices.  The trick here is to make very thorough
use of 'form xobjects' for anything which is used frequently.  So, for
example, your invoice template and letterhead might need to be drawn
and stored just once in that mega-pdf-file.  Then you only need to render
the words which differ on each page in the main story.    If you use these
techniques, it's amazing how many pages you can spit out and how
quickly.  And it's not worth an R&D effort if a couple of extra GB of RAM
will do the trick.

The second question I'd ask is if the client really needs each of
these to be delivered as a single file.  If they have, say, a 200,000
page stack of invoices, would they not be equally happy with a directory
of files each containing 1000 pages, or by client IDs, or some
other structure making it easy to find the PDF they want?

When clients have asked me for huge docs in the past, they have always
seen the wisdom of breaking it up a bit after some initial discussion.

- Andy