I'm using similar logic to what Chris Dee uses on LDraw.org to generate autocropped pictures with consistent zoom factor. I use 512x512 as the maximum image size, but position the camera at a set distance, so that most parts get cropped to be much smaller than 512x512. My end result is around 50MB.
Right now, I'm working on dividing the output up into a separate HTML page for each category. Having all 6000+ images in one page was causing problems in some web browsers.
Unless we can come up with a way to nicely paginate the results, combining everything into a single PDF isn't really useful. Having said that, Adobe Reader shouldn't have any problems viewing such a file, no matter how big. It doesn't load everything into memory up front as far as I know. In fact, I have an option in my script to generate all the images twice as big, then show them in the HTML page at 50% scale so that they will look nicer in the PDF. Since I'm not generating a PDF, I'm not using that option, although I suppose it would also produce really cool results on Apple devices with Retina displays.
Right now, I'm working on dividing the output up into a separate HTML page for each category. Having all 6000+ images in one page was causing problems in some web browsers.
Unless we can come up with a way to nicely paginate the results, combining everything into a single PDF isn't really useful. Having said that, Adobe Reader shouldn't have any problems viewing such a file, no matter how big. It doesn't load everything into memory up front as far as I know. In fact, I have an option in my script to generate all the images twice as big, then show them in the HTML page at 50% scale so that they will look nicer in the PDF. Since I'm not generating a PDF, I'm not using that option, although I suppose it would also produce really cool results on Apple devices with Retina displays.