Cannot export 10k nodes / 27mb Graphml file into PDF or any other image formats

Question

Hello,

I have a network that consists of approximately 10,000 nodes, and it's fairely complicated. When I generated this network on yEd, the .graphml file was already 27mb big.

Now, this .graphml file is fine. I can save / open, and I don't see any problems. I have a problem exporting, however. Exporting to any image files (BMP, JPG, etc) gives an error about the size. Exporting to PDF seems to go through at first, but the output PDF file shows nothing, the page is blank, even though the file is sizable. (about 10 mb) Exporting to SVG seems to cause all labels to disappear. Exporting to .EMF worked, and opening with MS Visio shows all nodes / connections / labels intact, but I could not find a way to convert the large EMF file to PDF.

Could you help me with my effort to produce a PDF file of my network? I very much appreciate your help.

-R

Answer 1

10k nodes is a lot and I am not sure any of the supported output formats can handle diagrams of that size.

However, it could be that you just used unsuitable settings for export. For this reason, I would like to ask you to post the exact settings you used for exporting to raster image (BMP/JPG), to PDF, and to SVG.
Please post the exact error message you received when exporting to raster image, too.
Additionally, I would like to ask you for the approximate dimensions of your diagram (see "Tools" -> "Analyze Graph", tab "Visual", setting "Bounding Box"), the average size of your nodes, and the average text size.

Comments

Hi Thomas, thank you so much for your help!

Bounding Box: [-426089,-16,852190,451358]

As for the export settings, I just used the default settings. Let me describe them here:

BMP/JPG: Original Size, Custom Width/Height 500, Margin 15, Complete Diagram, Scaling Factor 1.0, Image anti-aliasing checked (for JPG, Quality = 75) ------> Trying to export as images brings up an error about Image Size exceeds maximum size, and it's understandable since the the dimensions are very large

PDF: Original Size, Margin 15, Complete Diagram, Scaling 1.0, Text Rendering Policy is Vectorized Text, Automatic Page Settings checked -------> PDF is generated, and the size is pretty big (~10mb) but when I open the PDF, nothing shows up

SVG: Original Size, Margin 15, Complete Diagram, Scaling 1.0, Export URL checked, Open Links in New Window checked, Export Description as Tooltip checked ------> SVG file is generated fine, but when I open up using Visio / Internet explorer, the labels have disappeared

EMF: Original Size, Margin 15, Complete Diagram, Scaling 1.0 -----> EMF file is generated, and when I open the file with MS Visio, everything looks good! Unfortunately, I need the output graph in a PDF or some image format

If there is another export option I can try, please let me know. Thank you for your help again, Thomas.

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Raster image:
Your diagram is simply to large to be represented by a single image at zoom 1.
- JPEG supports a maximum image size of 65535×65535 (which your diagram exceeds by a large amount).
- A single BMP image representing your diagram would be approximately 358GB in size; even if yEd could create such a large file, I do not know any image viewer application that could handle such a big file.
That leaves two option. The first option is tiling, i.e. splitting the diagram accross several images. If you decide to take this approach, I suggest the PNG format and at least 20x20 tiles. Note, you will get 400 huge 42610px x 22568px tiles this way and the export will take a looong time - on my 8 core machine with solid state disc, generating these 400 files took approximately 40(!) minutes. The second option is specifying a really small "Scaling Factor" (e.g. 0.0025). This should result in a 2000px x 1000px image.

PDF:
After some testing, I think the generated PDF is probably "fine", however, none of the available PDF viewer applications (at least none that I know of) can handle documents with such a huge page in them. Again, tiling might be an option. With A4 as page size, exporting a 200000x200000 diagram resulted in a 276MB file of approximately 63000(!) pages for me.

SVG:
This actually worked without any problems for me. And honestly, I think this is the only viable option. Have you tried viewing the resulting document in Firefox instead of Internet Explorer?

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Hi Thomas,

Using FireFox solves it... it shows the labels fine! I guess it's just the IE that refuses to show the labels for some reason.

Thank you very much for your help, especially going so far as to test out a similar scenario to yield some numbers. Those are pretty crazy numbers of pages / file size / pixels. I was going to print out this giant chart on a 10 feet by 10 feet paper, but after seeing your page number approximates, I wonder if even 100 sqft will allow me to read the small label texts..

Nonetheless, thank you for your help! Much appreciated. By the way, yEd is a wonderful software. After using many comparable programs (including Visio) I was very much impressed by yEd graphic editor.