Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

For all things Mellel

Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler

Post Reply
fastmiso
Already downloaded the guide
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:02 pm

Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by fastmiso »

Hello,

I am working in a 190,000 word Mellel document (no images; all L-to-R text; hundreds of Bookends refs; scores of xrefs and auto-titles; some 15+ tables). I am having a lot of trouble with slowness and lag in this document, especially when inputting text.

A measure of this lag: As TextExpander (3.0.1) expands abbreviations for me, Mellel (2.7.3 build 2) cannot keep up with my typing. If "xref" expands to "cross-reference," my intention to write "one cross-reference to another" might end up "one to anocross-reference ther." I do not encounter this in an new, empty Mellel document, nor in TextExit or Pages. So I do not blame TextExpander; rather that's just where I feel it most.

Working with this Mellel doc I also get the spinning pizza/pinwheel/beach ball a bit more often now, sometimes just inputting text without expansion and rather often when saving (but that I can tolerate).

My computer is plenty up to it, I think [1]. I have run Onyx to clean out the font cache, since I've seen that suggested elsewhere for other issues. As for saving, I am not using the "Use compressed file format" preference.

So I wonder whether someone may have other tips on improving performance with longish docs in Mellel. Are there any other preferences or maintenance tasks that could come into play? (I mean other than splitting up my doc into smaller ones in the absence of a unifying "book file"). I don't know: could "Unscanning" my bibliographical refs within the Mellel doc improve speed?

Thank you very much for any suggestions.

[1] OS X 10.6.2, 2.2 GHz C2D, 4 GB 667 DDR2, 100+ GB free on HDD
DylanMuir
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 248
Joined: Tue Jan 30, 2007 11:31 am
Location: Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zürich

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by DylanMuir »

Hi,

Does this happen in every paragraph of the document, or only those paragraphs next to a table? I had problems in my thesis (100,000 words, 300 pages, approx. 70 figures): if I inserted a complex figure inline, and then began typing without a paragraph break in between, then typing would slow to a crawl.

DRM
fastmiso
Already downloaded the guide
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:02 pm

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by fastmiso »

Thanks for your response. There are no tables nearby right now, but that's good to know. It happens in even in long stretches of normal body paragraphs (most of the doc).

I thought maybe lots of OpenType features or ligatures in a long doc might slow things down, but I've turned all those off, just in case.

Thanks again.
DylanMuir
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 248
Joined: Tue Jan 30, 2007 11:31 am
Location: Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zürich

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by DylanMuir »

Do you have really really long paragraphs with no paragraph breaks? I just tested, and that also slows typing response to a crawl.

Are you by chance using line breaks, rather than paragraph breaks?

DRM
fastmiso
Already downloaded the guide
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:02 pm

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by fastmiso »

No, I have plenty of paragraph breaks. I *do* have quite a lot of line breaks (shift-return/soft) within some of the paragraphs of inset verse. But I don't know a nice way to avoid that.

Again, thanks.
shades
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Oct 21, 2005 12:12 am

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by shades »

Do you use style sheets? It would seem that appropriate style sheets would solve the multiple soft returns (Shift-Return).
Rich
old, slow, and confused...but at least I’m inconsistent!

iMac 27" (10. 13. 8 ) and MBP 13" Retina (10. 13. 8 )
fastmiso
Already downloaded the guide
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:02 pm

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by fastmiso »

Yes, I am using a style-set. The soft-returns are only at the ends of lines within a paragraph of inset verse. I can't yet think of a way to avoid those soft-returns unless I have each verse be its own paragraph, which seems undesirable.
macula
Knows everything, can also explain
Posts: 60
Joined: Sun Oct 11, 2009 7:27 am

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by macula »

DylanMuir wrote:Hi,
I had problems in my thesis (100,000 words, 300 pages, approx. 70 figures): if I inserted a complex figure inline, and then began typing without a paragraph break in between, then typing would slow to a crawl.
DRM
Did these issues result in crashes or text corruption eventually? Put otherwise, were they performance issues or stability issues?

Thank you.
Last edited by macula on Tue Mar 30, 2010 1:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DylanMuir
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 248
Joined: Tue Jan 30, 2007 11:31 am
Location: Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zürich

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by DylanMuir »

No stability problems that I noticed, and no corruption. Just a huge performance drop. It could perhaps be related to Mellel re-drawing images from scratch each time, rather than caching their appearance. That point is a major performance issue for scrolling in a document with complex .ai or .pdf figures.

DRM
fastmiso
Already downloaded the guide
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:02 pm

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by fastmiso »

DylanMuir wrote:No stability problems that I noticed, and no corruption. Just a huge performance drop.
Same for me.
jpavel
New to all this
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Aug 29, 2006 7:53 pm

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by jpavel »

Has there been any more insight into this slowdown problem in the past month?
I'm using Mellel on older PPC hardware, and the text lag becomes problematic even on, say, 90-page documents, so I'm quite eager for any solution.

(my documents have no tables, and no inserted figures, so the root cause must be something else)

Thanks,
Jesse
DylanMuir
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 248
Joined: Tue Jan 30, 2007 11:31 am
Location: Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zürich

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by DylanMuir »

Did you write to Mellel support? They may be interested.

DRM
jpavel
New to all this
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Aug 29, 2006 7:53 pm

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by jpavel »

I just wrote to support, also including a little discovery I made about the issue: if I open Mellel and a long document, and start typing, the lag is very noticeable, and Mellel uses 85% CPU (according to resource monitor). Then, if I simply open the Style Sets dialog and dismiss it, typing becomes quite a bit more responsive, and CPU usage drops to ~50%.

Jesse
redlers
Site Admin
Posts: 196
Joined: Wed Oct 19, 2005 10:19 pm

Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc

Post by redlers »

jpavel wrote:I just wrote to support, also including a little discovery I made about the issue: if I open Mellel and a long document, and start typing, the lag is very noticeable, and Mellel uses 85% CPU (according to resource monitor). Then, if I simply open the Style Sets dialog and dismiss it, typing becomes quite a bit more responsive, and CPU usage drops to ~50%.

Jesse
There are a number of variables that may influence performance:
  • The amount of Memory you have on your machine. The more, the better.
  • The speed of your machine. The faster, the better.
  • The amount of free disk space you have - the more constrained you are in this respect, the more your Mac needs to "page" memory and the slower the performance. (this seems to be the case with jpavel - how much free disk space you have, percentage wise?)
  • The amount of footnotes, cross references and style changes in your document. Mellel always "keeps it real" so if you have a 600+ pages long document with many of those, Mellel needs to calculate and paginate the text to properly layout the text with footnotes and calculate where the references really are.
Some practical advise:
  • Try to free some disk space. Less than 15 percent free space means trouble.
  • If the problem persists, create an additional document. You can maintain consistency via the style set. With cross references, you can reference a portion in the other document by referencing a "virtual target" and then, later on, join the documents and re-connect the virtual targets to bookmarks or headings in the unified document.
Post Reply