Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler
Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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
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
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Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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
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
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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.
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.
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- Location: Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zürich
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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
Are you by chance using line breaks, rather than paragraph breaks?
DRM
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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.
Again, thanks.
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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 )
old, slow, and confused...but at least I’m inconsistent!
iMac 27" (10. 13. 8 ) and MBP 13" Retina (10. 13. 8 )
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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.
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
Did these issues result in crashes or text corruption eventually? Put otherwise, were they performance issues or stability issues?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
Thank you.
Last edited by macula on Tue Mar 30, 2010 1:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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- Knows everything, can prove it
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Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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
DRM
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
Same for me.DylanMuir wrote:No stability problems that I noticed, and no corruption. Just a huge performance drop.
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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
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
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Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
Did you write to Mellel support? They may be interested.
DRM
DRM
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
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
Jesse
Re: Text input lag in long-ish Mellel doc
There are a number of variables that may influence performance: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
- 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.
- 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.