Re: PDF Limitations?

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005, Mike Wills wrote:

> The resulting file of a 3000 or so page PDF comes out to be about 5-10MB
> range I believe.

In that case the should be no problem with the XREF running out of space. 
The PDF Reference (version 1.5) states that the format of the xref is as 
follows:

nnnnnnnnnn ggggg n eol

where nnnnnnnnnn is a 10-digit byte offset, ggggg is a 5-digit generation 
number, n is a literal keyword identifying this as an in-use entry, and 
eol is a 2-character end-of-line sequence.

Therefore, if the PDF file is only 10MB large, the byte offset cannot 
possibly be larger than 10 digits.  So the 3,000 page limit is not due to 
limitations of the PDF xref.

btw - the offset is the number of bytes from the beginning of the file. 
The largest the offset could possibly be is the size of the file.  That 
means a PDF is limited to 10GB in size (before the xref and without doing 
any other tricks).

James Rich

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