It appears that external objects (specifically, image files placed on the various pages) are not actually read until the pdf->save() call at the end. This may be problematic, in that I'm playing with a script that may generate a rather LARGE PDF containing more than 10,000 images.

I'm wondering if anything like the $pdf->finishobjects(@obj) call might help; but the documentation doesn't really tell me very much about it!

It does look like this module lets you insert pages in any order, and write on pages in any order, so maybe in fact nothing is really done until the end. It might not matter; I'm not actually that worried about the temp directory capacity on modern systems, and a BOTE calculation suggests the sum of the image files, at the size I'm currently proto-typing at, is a very few gigabytes. (Temp files are written out as a necessary step in re-scaling the files to sizes suitable to their appearance in the PDF; yes, using GD you can import an image file, re-scale it in memory, and put that directly into PDF::API2, without going through any temporary files, and it even works...but I was kind of shocked to discover that that was TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE slower than using Image::Imlib2 to read, rescale, and write the image to a temp file and then reading it using the PDF::API2 method.)

(As a side note--I'm kind of shocked how far I've gotten with this since starting to commit code this morning. PDF::API2, despite some documentation issues, which are frequently commented on, seems to be fairly easy to get somewhere with.)