Thanks for the input.

I had to run a 1000 record file which should be done tomorrow (had to go out for Halloween), Then I have a month to work on this before the Winter Holiday project.

Sorry for the ugly code - it looks better on my console.

I did already think about adding print statements to help profile my code and always do this to debug issues, just never had a program I needed to profile before. I will do this first in the future before posting. I like the idea of pre-loading the images into memory, I agree, that could be a huge savings.

Another thing I am thinking of is writing a vdx file instead of writing one large pdf. vdx includes each image only once in a serialized form along with PPML which is an xml-type markup language that references the images rather than includes them as pdf's. I've got 400 pages of documentation to read on this though and only recently began understanding the concepts of serializing images.

FYI- this script adds variable images, not just text, which is part of the problem.

I'll keep you posted on my findings.