Hi ruzam- When I originally started this project, I did so with low res files and the speed and output size was manageable. Unfortunately the end result did not look very professional on the printed piece.

In most cases of standard screen readable pdfs I agree with you, but in my case we need high resolution images for the output. Lower res wouldn't work.

However the changes jethro suggested solved all of the problems I was having and saved me from rewriting the whole project using PPML. Apparently by moving the image declarations and holding the variable images in an array, PDF::API2 builds the PDF with reused image links instead of writing copies of the images over and over. In my case 1000 records will be an average, so the time and size savings were huge.