Waking the Worldseed file size - what gives?

[Boedullus]

I just downloaded my copy of Waking the Worldseed. Very very excited that Paizo has finally created a high level AP. That said, the book, while around the usual length (68 pages), is a whopping 340 Mb. That's larger than the pdf of every book in Dead Suns, Attack of the Swarm and Dawn of Flame COMBINED. While it's not breaking my machine or anything, I don't have the biggest hard drive, so it's not great for me.
Anyone have any insights on why the thing is soooooooooo much bigger than its predecessors?

[Cellion]

I don't have the PDF to check personally, but I'd guess its just that someone at Paizo forgot to do an image compression pass on all the borders and images serving as page backgrounds and tables, etc.

There should be PDF optimizers available online to help reduce that file size. Not sure if they work with Paizo's PDFs (since they're locked down a bit better) but you could give one of those a try.

[kahn265]

I was curious about that as well.

[MythicFox]

The Threefold Conspiracy PDFs were unusually large as well, though not nearly to this extent.

[Boedullus]

Book 2 has the same dang problem. Good grief - these 2 files alone make up over a quarter of my whole SF pdf folder, including all the rule and setting books. If they keep this up, I'm going to wind up needing a new hard drive.

[Nimor Starseeker]

Will the file size let you extract a high quality map for print?

[John Mangrum]

Maps don't seem appreciably larger than usual. Only thing I've noticed so far is that the last couple of AP installments have a few "secret" art files hidden inside them. Usually this is a duplicate (like the same map being included twice), but AP #32, for an example, also includes one of the half-page illustrations from AP #30.

(Conversely, the front covers, which used to be at least two or three separate art elements, have been flattened to a single image.)

[Cellion]

I've now actually bought Waking the Worldseed and got to dig in to what's going on with the PDF.

The user-visible images are all the same quality as normal. I checked against Dawn of Flame book 1 and found that the resolutions and number of images was pretty similar. The maps are the same resolution as the updated Dawn of Flame PDFs (~1200x800), or at least that's what my PDF extractor is spitting out for me.

The file has noticeably poor PDF compression applied to it. I have a basic 3rd party PDF re-compression tool I've used in the past. When I attempt to run it on Waking the Worldseed with middle-of-the-range settings, I get a 50 MB file as output. Note that if I run the same tool on any other 68 page adventure path volume the resulting file is ALSO about 50-60 MB. That is to say, the other AP volumes have been compressed far better, and when I re-compress them I'm increasing their size.

So this one is on Paizo to fix. If you want to re-compress the file yourselves so that you can use it on your tablets and so it doesn't take up tons of hard drive space, I can confirm that you can do so without any noticeable loss in quality.

[Paul Ryan]

Sadly the tools I have won't let me try to compress the files due to the access permissions. Hopefully sooner or later someone at Paizo will realise that they have some rather noticeable quality control issues that have been slipping through since, judging by the sudden file size jumps from a consistent 15-30 megs to first 75-100 then to ~330, sometime since February or so.

[LotsOfLore]

I am very excited for the new high level AP, although I have to admit I was quite disappointed when after seeing the MB count on that beast of a pdf I was super excited for higher resolution maps...

Alas, the maps are the usual low res, despite the increase in size. I thought that announcement about Paizo enhancing the pdf assets somehow would apply here but, no. :/

[Ixal]

Paul Ryan wrote:

Sadly the tools I have won't let me try to compress the files due to the access permissions. Hopefully sooner or later someone at Paizo will realise that they have some rather noticeable quality control issues that have been slipping through since, judging by the sudden file size jumps from a consistent 15-30 megs to first 75-100 then to ~330, sometime since February or so.

Corona seems to have hit Paizo rather hard considering the issues that come up (file sizes not addressed, still no forum for this AP, FAQ not updated).