17 Hours for a 500 record Mail Merge - Publisher 2003

[Jay]

I am trying to publish a PS file out of Publisher 2003 beta that gets its
info from a table in Access. The file is a simple Legal size document with a
front and back for each record. 95% of the text is static and the doc has 4
dynamic images per page.
AT the current rate of output, this will take 17 hours to go through all
5000 records. I have downsampling turned off for the images as they are
small file sizes. Running WinXP on a 1.8 GHz box with 512meg of ram. Does
this sound right?
Thanks,
Jay

 

[Ed Bennett]

After managing to set up OE-QuoteFix on his new PC, Ed reads a message

Does this sound right?

Yes. Well, not necessarily _right_, as such, because it shouldn't really
happen, but that is behaving as it is expected to.

 

[°°°MS°Publisher°°°]

I merged a photograph and text to business size cards, 246 in total and the
merge took about 6-7 minutes which I thought was acceptable.

Does your sound right, in Postscript - hmmm perhaps yes. I know how long it
can take to produce a Postscript file of around 80 page with graphics,
without merging, so yes, perhaps the time yours is taking may be ok. Does
seem a little excessive, but without knowing the DPI and size of the
graphics etc. it is a little difficult to pass informed comment.

--

 

[Jay]

Thanks for the input. To be more specific, I am trying to create a PDF to
send to my printers. I am in the magazine subscription business and we send
out magazine offers to our current customers. Ideally, we like to have a
picture of the magazine being offered in the piece. I have my DB set up so
that the path to the image file (i.e. Time magazine cover image) is
automatically generated (i.e. c:\my Docs\mag images\Time.jpg) as MS Pub
indicates.
When I try to print either a .ps file or print to PDF while using dynamic
images called from the DB, the process takes an un acceptably long time. For
instance, I started a merge of ~4200 records last night at 10 pm. AT 8 am
only 1800 records had been processed after 10 hours!
If I use static images the process is very fast. I can process 1000 records
in about 5-6 minutes. The trouble with that process is that a separate
template has to be created for each title. In this project there are 23
titles. A real pain since this is supposed to be a feature of MS Pub 2003.
BTW I'm using small images at ~100k each.
Thanks!

 

[Randall Arnold]

Jay, welcome to my world, where the Publisher/Access team just doesn't quite
cut it.

I recommend moving up to industrial-strength solutions if your budget
allows. Say, Quark for publishing and a database such as SQL Server or
Oracle. Seems to me you're straining the boundaries of your current
process. So far it's my understanding that Microsoft has no plans to create
a high-level version of Publisher.

Randall Arnold

Thanks for the input. To be more specific, I am trying to create a PDF to
send to my printers. I am in the magazine subscription business and we send
out magazine offers to our current customers. Ideally, we like to have a
picture of the magazine being offered in the piece. I have my DB set up so
that the path to the image file (i.e. Time magazine cover image) is
automatically generated (i.e. c:\my Docs\mag images\Time.jpg) as MS Pub
indicates.
When I try to print either a .ps file or print to PDF while using dynamic
images called from the DB, the process takes an un acceptably long time. For
instance, I started a merge of ~4200 records last night at 10 pm. AT 8 am
only 1800 records had been processed after 10 hours!
If I use static images the process is very fast. I can process 1000 records
in about 5-6 minutes. The trouble with that process is that a separate
template has to be created for each title. In this project there are 23
titles. A real pain since this is supposed to be a feature of MS Pub 2003.
BTW I'm using small images at ~100k each.
Thanks!

I merged a photograph and text to business size cards, 246 in total and the
merge took about 6-7 minutes which I thought was acceptable.

Does your sound right, in Postscript - hmmm perhaps yes. I know how

long

 

[Jay]

Thanks all for the info. I will look into possibly another image file
format. Although at this point they are being "printed" to a .ps file for
Adobe Acrobat .
I've been avoiding quark due to cost, learning curve etc. but maybe that is
the way to go.

Jay

 

[Jay]

Just an update, I tried to do the merge with Tiffs instead of Jpegs and got
the same results. It takes between 14 & 16 seconds to process 1 record as
compared to 1.2 to 1.35 seconds to process a record with out the images
being called.
Jay