Draw with large files crashing

[DerekKeats]

Hello folks,
I have used Libreoffice Draw to prepare the PDF files for a number of children’s books that were created in Draw in its native ODG file format. They are very image-rich with high-resolution images. Up to 36 pages, it can get sluggish, but it still works fine. With the latest 44 page one (a 1.1 Gb file), Draw hangs, crashes, sometimes loses the data when it crashes. I am on Ubuntu 24.10 with the latest Libreoffice release (but all recent releases behave the same way). During normal use for that large file, HTOP shows only up to 50% of CPU use and only up to 30% of memory use, so it doesn’t seem like a resource problem, except when saving 100% of a CPU is used. System monitor shows that only one of the sixteen CPUs are maxing out even then. Seems like maybe there is some issue with threads, but I know nothing about that. The machine has 32Gb of RAM so it should be enough.

Has anyone experienced this and found a solution? I really don’t want to use anything else, and I would love to find a way to solve this.

[ajlittoz]

@DerekKeats

used Libreoffice Draw to prepare the PDF files

Draw is not a PDF editor. It sees PDF contents as a collection of drawing shapes (even text) and operates on them as a graphics editor. You can then export the result to PDF but this won’t give you an optimised PDF. It is likely that it is bigger than strictly necessary.

@DerekKeats

I really don’t want to use anything else

This is a bad decision. You didn’t describe the architecture of your book. It has probably text parts and graphical parts. You should process the images separately in a dedicated program like GIMP (available in Ubuntu repository) to tweak crop, clip and scale them to the exact dimensions and pixel density needed in the final document, so that Writer has nothing to do but to accept images 1:1.

Writer is the ideal tool for text. You can insert images in it either as embedded material or links to the image files. The latter solution keeps Writer document size to a minimum.

When you’re satisfied, you export to PDF. This is more reliable than trying to patch or modify a PDF directly.

[DerekKeats]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. My problem is not with the PDF output or the size of the images, I don’t really care much about the PDF size since it gets eaten and spit out by the printer’s systems anyway. I am not using Writer, I am using Draw. My problem is also not with the size of the image, they are the correct size for the intended purpose, for the most part I create them in Darktable from RAW files and optimise them using a Nautilus plugin that I created for the purpose. Nor am I modifying a PDF directly, I am using the ODG file format (I hope I made this clearer in my edit to the original question). Draw is a very capable vector graphics editor that I have used extensively for years, and I like using something that I know intimately well. It has served me well until now, so I may have hit its limits.

Again, it is not about the images or the PDF output. I was wondering if there is a trick to get around the sluggishness and crashing without the app using significant system resources.