Maximum pages that can be in one pdf file

[shavon]

Good morning:

Would someone please tell me the maximum pages that can be included in one pdf file? What is the impact on loading that file on my system? How easily can such a file be searched? Thank you.

 

[tgreer]

I've never seen an analysis like this... my guess would be that there isn't a limit inherent in the PDF specification, unless, hmm. Everything is an object, and those objects are numbered, so I guess there might be a maximum based on whether it's a 32-bit number, some implementation limit like that. That doesn't correspond necessarily to pages thought.

Your actual practical limit is probably based on the amount of memory in your machine.

PDFs can be byte-served, which means streamed to a browser a page-at-a-time. That doesn't address the issue of local access, though.

I know I'm not answering your question, but hopefully I'm adding something to your thought process.

I'm curious why you'd need such huge PDFs?

Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

 

[shavon]

Hi Thomas:

Thanks for your reply. We are an imaging company and we are exploring a PDF solution for a client. This involves creating pdf's from scanned paper documents. I am not sure exactly what this is for, but my boss asked me to find out.

A better question might be, "what is the maximum file size of a pdf file?" Thanks again.

 

[tgreer]

Scanned pages can be huge in and of themselves. Easily 30MB+ per page.

You might consider an image format called DjVu, pronounced Deja Vu. The windows licensee/vendor of the format is LizardTech.

I used it very succesfully in a CD-ROM distributable phone book. Good image quality, with tiny file sizes (it uses wavelet based compression). The text is OCR'd and compressed, further reducing file sizes.

Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com