Copy into document graphics vs. Import by Reference

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:17 -0800 8/12/06, Gillian Flato wrote:

>We're having a debate in my TW team about whether to use Import by Ref
>for graphics or Copy into Document. I always Import by reference. The
>hardware writers copy into document. Their books take much longer to
>build than mine, and I am convinced that it's because they are copying
>the graphics into the document.
> 
>Am I right, is this what's causing their slow book building process?  I
>have much bigger books than they do, in terms of pages, but they have
>bigger graphics.

You may well be right. Copying graphics in naturally makes the FrameMaker source files much larger, and large files make books that take longer to build. There may also be something subtler going on, but I suspect this is the guts of it.

However, a *lot* of graphics can make books take longer to build, too, irrespective of whether they are copied or by reference. As I have recently found to my cost, with a book with some thousands of import by reference links.

>Also, what are some arguments for importing by ref vs copying in? What
>do you guys do?

I think this has been debated on the group before, so the archives might render something, but afaik the guts of it is the tradeoff between document size, ruggedness and portability. Importing by reference keeps your documents small and FrameMaker fast, but the links are frangible. Importing by copy makes your documents portable, but bigger. You also lose the ability to update a single graphics and have it change everywhere it is used, so there's a version control element to this discussion too.

-- 
Steve