Dealing with a large doc

[fdalbo]

Hi guys,
I am coping with some probs here. I am (todah le-Elohim) about to finish my PhD thesis. The main Latin-Hebrew text is about 320 pages long, about 1,5Mb in size: Mellel is actuatlly quite slow, loading the page every time I make the tiniest correction. What can I do in order to improve the performance of my 4yrs old mac running Mellel and without splitting the 320 pages into secondary files?
Thanks,

Federico

[donb]

This is a rather unusual situation, these days. We need to know great deal more about your computer: megahertz; and amount of RAM, in particular. Usually the best thing to do in such a situation is to restart your computer but with nothing loading, i.e. hold down the shift key while you restart the computer and keep it held down until it is fully restarted. Then load Mellel, so that only it is running.

The most probable cause of your problem is almost certainly insufficient RAM, so that your computer system is using almost al your RAM for itself and leaving not enough for Mellel to function properly. Normally a 1.5 MB document should not cause any noticeable slowing down in Mellel.

Don Broadribb

[Eyal Redler]

Hi Federico,

A 320 page document should not be as slow as you describe. It could be that you're running Mellel on a particularly slow computer but it could be that the document contains something that Mellel is not well optimized for. If the latter is true, it would be very interesting to see this document and see if we can fix Mellel to handle such documents better.

Please contact us at support at redlers dot com

[nicka]

I see significant slowdowns with a 300 page (3.3 MB) document on my 1.5GHz, 1.25GB PowerBook. I have plenty of hard drive space, and the RAM is the maximum possible for this Mac, so my conclusion has been that it is just a limitation of the hardware and some of Mellel's code. As I have said before here, slowdowns are most visible (and annoying) in typing and deleting text. Scrolling and jumping to auto-titles remain fairly snappy.

[fdalbo]

Shalom Eyal, I sent you my file.
thanks

[daiyi]

I see significant slowdowns with a 300 page (3.3 MB) document on my 1.5GHz, 1.25GB PowerBook. I have plenty of hard drive space, and the RAM is the maximum possible for this Mac, so my conclusion has been that it is just a limitation of the hardware and some of Mellel's code. As I have said before here, slowdowns are most visible (and annoying) in typing and deleting text. Scrolling and jumping to auto-titles remain fairly snappy.

I've noticed the slowdowns in typing and deleting text at times, but by no means on a consistent basis, and on much smaller documents. So, if may not have to do exclusively with file size. Are you running many other applications at the same time? Is the max RMA for your PowerBook 1 GB or 2GB? I'm using a 1G MacBook (1.83 Core Duo) with 2 GB RAM and 120 GB HD only 80% full.

[nicka]

Are you running many other applications at the same time?

Yes, more than five, usually, but it doesn't seem to be a causal factor. I get the same kind of slow speed typing in long documents even when I quit all other applications and run just Mellel.

Is the max RMA for your PowerBook 1 GB or 2GB?

1.25GB, to the best of my knowledge (it's the last model of 12" PowerBook).

I'm using a 1G MacBook (1.83 Core Duo) with 2 GB RAM and 120 GB HD only 80% full.

Your Mac's processor is a lot more powerful than mine. Perhaps you don't see the same general slow response to typing just because of that. There might be specific causes for the occasional slowdowns you are seeing (e.g. perhaps during an autosave).

[farcas]

Though this is an old post, is there anyone who can speak to the max size mellel doc that they've created/worked in? I ask because I'd like to work on a large text and rather than break it up (because Mellel does not allow, as far as I'm aware, to merge files together nicely). I estimate at least 1000+ or even 2000 pages with auto-titles, citations, cross references. Essential I'm putting all my notes into on Mellel doc.
Is this advisable? Am I setting my self up for a problem later? iOS?

I'm working on pretty fast machines so it won't be anything but a question of how far can Mellel go.

A related question: Is there a way to sew together multiple Mellel docs?
Also, is there a way to print sections easily?


Thanks!

[Bulow]

A related question: Is there a way to sew together multiple Mellel docs?
Also, is there a way to print sections easily?

Melle is 'cottage industry' where both these procedures are concerned: cut and paste. In the case of sewing together several files: choose all, copy and paste. If you want to print a section or a selection: choose what you want, copy to a new (temporary) file and print. It works pretty well, but it is funny that nothing more sophisticated has ever been introduced in Mellel.

[nicka]

That is odd, particularly given that the cut and paste method has limitations. It doesn't really work if you've got numbered auto-titles, since what was (e.g.) section 4.3 will suddenly be section 1.1.
A workaround is to insert page breaks if necessary at the beginning and end of the section you want to print, and then set the relevant page range in the print dialogue.

It would be nice to be able to do various things with selected sections:
- to get a word count for them (or even better, live word counts for each section in the outline sidebar),
- to search and replace only within them,
- and even to 'hoist' a section (in the way that outlining software and Scrivener can do).

[farcas]

The copy and paste option isn't the greatest (for the reasons stated above). It would be much more efficient and effective to have dropdown box to select elements in the outline and then click print or export to PDF etc. The outline is amazing feature but could use nice improvements, one of which could be this print option.

I also like the other suggestions with selected sections mentioned: (1) live word count(s) for sections in the outline sidebar (obviously with an option to turn it on or off) would be helpful (not necessary), (2) search and replace within a section (rather than within a 'selection' as in the current system, (3) other improvements in the direction of Scrivener (e.g. the hoisting mentioned above), and (4) some sort of formatting and mark up in the outline sidebar.]

To get back to my original question, with all this complexity, what's the max pages before things get quirky? Just this morning I opened up my 300 page mellel doc and everything was jacked up. I closed it and reopened and it was the same thing. I finally restarted my Mac and moved the file off iCloud and it was fine. But this is what I'm worried about. So does anyone know what's the largest Mellel file anyone has heard of?


Thanks!

[Sambenegal]

I think that large collections of documents are becoming increasingly common.The public internet currently has more than web pages, while private intranets also contain an abundance of text data. A vast amount of important scientific data appears as technical abstracts and papers. Given such large document collections it is important to organize them into structured ontologies. This organization facilitates navigation and search, and at the same time provides a framework for continual maintenance as document repositories grow in size. I think data mining tools like informatica can give solutions to these problems.

[timofcanberra]

Hi Farcas

my PhD is currently at 67mb. 500 pages, 300 graphics (tables imported from indesign and illustrator figures). I do have a retina mac with fusion drive and 8mb of ram but I run parallels vm with windows 10 as I cut and paste Statistica outputs into the thesis. Only slow area is live bibliography but even that updates in under 10 seconds (650+ citations and 450 references). I think Mellel is extremely fast most of the time and way more stable than Word. My one gripe is the lack of a split screen view which would help when cross referencing or updating previous sections.

I note you say that you were using icloud - not something I would do for long documents. I use dropbox but work locally and then transfer to dropbox. Mellel saves frequently which is noticeable under cloud conditions.

hope this help but I am yet to find the limit of Mellel in terms of document size.