L.O. Pattern Fills
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I've done my first set of house plan drawings using Pattern Fills but the memory demand is causing problems. I'm running Windows 7 in 32bit with 3.5Gb of RAM but I find just accessing different pages in the same file I take nearly 400Mb memory hit as each page opens despite only having four patterns loaded. Anyone else noticed this or having problems with memory demands?
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Are you using custom pattern fill images? If so, can you tell me the resolution of those images? The built-in pattern fill images are quite small and shouldn't cause a noticeable memory cost.
thanks,
Marc -
Hi Marc, they are custom fills because I couldn't find patterns that would give a sharp or consistent result from those supplied as standard. My drawings are generally vector as raster doesn't always look as clean as I would like when exported to PDF.
I created them using LO with paper 40mm x 40mm (smallest workable size due to some hard coded margin limit) and used a line weight of 0.71pt=0.25mm. The patterns were exported as PNG images at 472 x 472px to achieve 300dpi, retain the line weight and look sharp at x1 scale. They are transparent monochrome but LO outputs as 32bit depth which makes them ~10kb in size.
Hope that clarifies?
Any suggestions on how to make them more workable?
Trevor
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Hi Trevor-
You will find that images of that size will take a sizeable chunk of memory. You may be better off trying to create them in photoshop or another specific image editor so that you can make an image smaller than 40mm x 40mm. The goal is to get the smallest possible image (pixel size) that gives you the full pattern at the scale and resolution you need.
I would expect that the memory usage would be flat once your pattern fills have all been loaded. If you switch back and forth between two pages, does your memory usage continue to grow?
I may be able to give you more specific guidance if you could share either the full LayOut file or perhaps some of your pattern fill images.
thanks,
Marc -
Hi Marc, I guess your first paragraph answers a key point that the images should be as small as possible, I was uncertain whether a large or small image was more efficient in L.O. and also under pressure to get the drawings published at the time. I will have a play based on your advice and see how much difference it makes.
The memory usage was flat once loaded, it just seemed to be a very big hit and enough for me to need a memory upgrade to avoid bug splats.
There's not much point in uploading the files if they are so inefficient and I have a few graphics options to crop the images and lower the bit depth which I will do and then post them as they may be of interest to others on this forum.
One other aspect you may be able to answer... I have a plan with a number of connected straight walls; is it more memory efficient using several (un-stroked) rectangles or a continuous trace to create a single pattern fill?
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