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#201 Library with graphics inside are getting heavy
I have created library with some components. It is getting heavy very fast when I am adding some graphics to the components. It can get >40Mbytes easly. What is strange is that if I delete the component the library is not getting smaller at all (I have tried both formats SQLite3 and MS Access). What I have also noticed is if I open the ".mdb" library in MS access and do "encode/decode" or "duplicate" the DB the output file is much smaller and still works afterwards in TinyCAD (no data lost). Can you look at this issue and try add some "compression" to the DB when is being saved?
SQLite.org supplies a free command line SQL tool that can edit TinyCAD symbol libraries (.TCLib). It has a SQL command called "VACUUM" that will eliminate all unneeded space and produce a new symbol library. This is the only way that I have at the moment to compress and clean a symbol library. The FAQ on the SQLite.org site mentions this issue and it is common to all database systems that I am aware of including Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server. It is an issue with how databases are structured and stored. Deleted symbols are only marked as "deleted" and the space is flagged for reuse. In my observations, this is never very efficient, though.
I am looking into a way to provide this manual compression and cleanup from within TinyCAD, but this is a long ways off.
Also suggest that you only embed .png graphics. They are lossless, unlike .jpg files and small, unlike .bmp or .tiff files.
There is also a commercial tool called "Navicat". It is the best database editor that I have found, but it is not free. If you purchase it, you will need the SQLite version or one of the combo versions that also includes SQLite. You may also find some open source tools other than the command line tool that the official SQLite.org site provides.