How to Handle Big PDF Files

Hi,
We are curious to know how others are dealing with large PDF files. By large we mean 10's of 1000's of pages. Things like A/R Statements and Invoices are huge.
We have done interesting things like splitting up the UBEs with data selection to bring the pdf size down.
We have many complaints from end users, on both the terminal servers and the web client that it takes too long (sometimes never coming back) to open these pdfs.

What are others doing with their big pdfs? Or are you just saying 'sorry' to the users like we are?

Thanks.

Sue

Xe Coexistent SP22Q1 iSeries V5R2, all client platforms

One way to deal with the problem is to find out if the report is printing on too fine a level of detail. In other words, is anybody expected to make sense of a 1000 page report?

If not, consider summarizing the printout so that the printed information contain something humanly understandable.

This suggestion will usually mean making custom changes to the report itself. It is a technique we have used many times. Sometimes it solves the problem you are seeing...

Cheers,

Chris

Sue,

I come across this issue now and again. Technically speaking, I usually set the output retrieval timeout value in the client jde.ini file to 10 minutes. I know, that sounds like a lot, but I have seen PDFs containing 25000 pages that take easily 5 minutes to retieve. I agree with Chris about making sense out of reports containing these many pages. If this is what the business wants, then it comes down to good old education. I too use the 'sorry' answer on occation, but then as much as possible try to educate the end user. As for PDFs never showing up, it's simply a matter of the jdenet process timing out (OneWorld does not tell you when it times out). Remember, a PDF containing 20000 pages will probably be around 2000 MB in size. I usually use the 1000 pages = 100 MB generalization estimate. Depending on your network speed, it can take a significant amount of time the transfer files of this size between your application/enteprise server and the client machine.

[NETWORK QUEUE SETTINGS]
;JDENETTimeout=60;
JDENETTimeout=600 ; 10 minutes

Just a thought,

One of the best ways to improve performance on PDF's is to not use all the plug-ins that come with Acrobat. Use just the bare essentials (printing and maybe the search) - everything else should be removed. (in :\program files\adobe\acrobat *.0\reader\plug_ins\ (* = verson number) - all of these have to load each time the PDF is pulled up.

Note; on MFrames - the PDF is copied from the enterprise server to the MFrame that they are currently signed onto (make sure you have a clean up process for the MFrames - this will get out of hand quickly).

As long you have a good connection between your MFrames and cleaned up the plethora of plug-ins, you should be able to handle large PDF's without too much problem.