Copy in Preview Mode with PDF in Container results in huge object

Issue report by John Duncan

Product

FileMaker Pro

Version

11.0v4, 12.0v4

Operating system version

MacOS-X 10.8.4

Description of the issue

A PDF is inserted into a non-interactive small container object of 187x141 px in a table with 1 record. The container is set to "scale to fit". The layout with the container is placed in "Preview Mode" with a page size a couple of pixels larger than the size of the container and a copy script step is done. The the script switches to a different layout with a different empty container and the clipboard of the preview mode is pasted into the second container. The original container was 1002003 bytes long but the copy/paste version was 16788041 bytes long or almost 17 times larger than the original.

Steps to reproduce the problem

see above

Expected result

Since the container object is displayed in a small size and is scaled to fit and the page setup size is matched to the size of the object the idea is to get a thumbnail of the PDF to avoid the problem of FileMaker sending the entire PDF across the network. It is expected that the thumbnail would be smaller than the original or at worst the same size but it comes out larger.

Actual result

The copied preview page is 16x larger than the original container. If I export the "thumbnail" and then open it with Acrobat Pro and optimize the size goes from 16MB to 94KB

Doing a Print-to-PDF also produces an oversize document and sometimes crashes FileMaker Pro 11.

Exact text of any error message(s) that appear

No error messages are displayed

Configuration information

The problem has been reproduced on both MacOS-X 10.6 and 10.8. It does not occur on Windows and can not occur on FileMaker Go due to the lack of Preview Mode.

Workaround

The workaround that we have found is to check to see if the thumbnail is bigger than the original and if that is the case to use the original instead.