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I'm going to go with "This person has absolutely no idea what they're talking about". Unless all your vector graphics are being split into hundreds of individual images I can't see how its possible. Even then, they wouldn't be full page. Maybe they're counting layers in the images (still a lot of layers)? Do you flatten your images before embedding them?

Everything must be flattened for PDF 1.3 (the current standard is 1.6) but there are different sorts of flattening and I think I might have to play with the Indesign settings to find the one that works for Lulu. The fact that none of this is on their website and I'm using their print profile is staggering!

The phrase "May I speak to your supervisor?" comes to mind.

Indeed!

Although this time I'd rather come up with the solution and then get them to update their documentation with a bit more help. The last thing I want is another author desperately trying to get a print to fall foul of the same problems and give up. I like the Lulu service generally, I think their first line support is dependent entirely on the third party printer's feedback.

Absolutely. They get a error code and maybe a description from the printer. The printers are built for speed and not specifically to be user friendly so the error codes could be a bit vague. Still this comment about 7000 images would seem like the printer's error reporting system failing.

I understand the lulu guy's need to rely on what they're provided, but their policies seem to be that they are not allowed to try and reverse engineer the printer's logic to get back to the original problem. That or most of them are not capable of that. My thought is that by escalating this to the tech's supervisor, that person may have a better aggregate knowledge of different problems. Having worked support before, when you hit a nonsense wall, the best solution is to ask someone else.

I've worked with 1st line support a lot and the good ones would not put "you have over 7000 images" in the email without checking out the PDF first. If the tool/printer/3rd party/ticket system said "there are 7000 images" then I'd question how that was possible and why the 180MB PDF, which is well below the limit of 800MB, could possibly have 7000 300DPI images. Good support would flag it to a supervisor before sending that out in an email.

This feels more like "it's not my problem" attitude, which is terrible coming from 1st line support.

I wonder if any of the file optimization options in this video from would help. It's intended for web optimization so it isn't completely what you want but maybe fiddling with some of the settings mentioned would do something. There were some options about image fragments etc.

There are some more RPG Now pdf tutorials but not one that I saw on how to print with them.

do keep us updated!

New version uploaded and ordered. This time I used the transparency flattener to turn all graphics into raster. I believe that turns it in 186 JPGs. 400MB, but under their 800MB limit.