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I have been working on a fairly long document, about 55,000 words. If I type in a sentence, perhaps just 10 words, it’s more than one and a half minutes before the sentence is entered into the page. A few corrections might mean another minute’s wait.     It’s ridiculous.  I have had to go back to InDesign on this document until something improves.

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I have also noticed a slowdown when typing in this beta version 1.8.0.502. I made a copy of a file that works fine in the release version where there is no noticeable slowdown. It takes a couple of seconds for words to appear in this beta. The file has quite a few linked images but this does not impact it's performance in the 1.7.3 release. I also rebooted the Mac and closed down other apps but it was still the same.

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Looks fairly standard, should actually work at normal speed ... I was expecting complicated master pages, images or a layout with lots of columns and wrapped items.

I guess what happens is, that when you change text somewhere, the whole document is re-calculated (e.g. add an extra line of text on page 1 and everything shifts one line down up to the last page).

Please try editing something on one of the first pages and then something on one of the last pages to see if this makes a difference.

If it does, you might want to consider cutting your text in several ,chunks' (ideally the software would do that automatically and only re-calculate up to the next page break, e.g. at the beginning of another chapter).

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I have tried that with the Pages Panel and tried about everything else; it makes no difference. Maybe if the whole document weren't flowing but was distinctly separated into chapters that might be better. It's too complicate to do that now. Anyway I think the system ought to be able to cope with a long document. I have given up on Publisher for this document. I see from the forums other people seem to be having the same problem. I'm afraid it's back to Indesign for now.

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    Hi,

I have report similar behaviour with AP.

My document had about 200 pages, after do everything you suggest, link images, document at 72 ppi, the performance was so low.

I noticed that the worst performance was obtained managing simple text. AP takes around 2-3 seconds to just modify any the letters of a word.

Recently I have notice that with a 22 pages document, with the same conditions of the first one, again the performance of the text flow was extremely low.

Regards

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Can’t believe this!

Isn’t it possible

  • to paste a bunch of "lorem ipsum" text (for example using this site: https://loremipsum.de) copy and paste this text so long, until you have as much pages as you have now,
  • to test, if the slowdown happens here too and
  • if the problem reoccurs, to upload this document to the link, which Jon posted?

To find a malfunction of an application, it is necessary to have a sample, which demonstrates the issue. Otherwise reporting issues is nothing more than grumbling.

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I made a test file (attached). It only took about 5 minutes.

It's 462 pages of Lorem Ipsum, on Letter-sized paper, 2-column layout, justified text, Garamond No8 font. This is longer than the books I normally make, but with much simpler layout - no images, no drop caps, no tables, only one font, etc. (I normally make 200-250 page roleplaying games.)

It is indeed noticeably slow. Typing takes quite a while to show up. Typing "Typing here is slow" on the final page takes 15 full seconds to show up after I'm done with the sentence. On the first page, I can type "Typing here is not so bad" and it shows up immediately. The farther down the document I go, the worse it gets (which is the reverse of what I would have expected). Interestingly, moving around something that's word-wrapped is pretty quick regardless of where you're doing it.

This is in Affinity Publisher 1.7.3, most up-to-date public version, on MacOS 10.15.1 running on a MacBook Pro 2.9 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 with 8 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM. I know, it's not the version you're discussing, but hopefully this will help you test anyway.

Can I recommend adding a feature for book files?

PublisherLongBookTest.afpub

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4 hours ago, mac_heibu said:

Can’t believe this!

Isn’t it possible

For Serif to just make a dummy document as Colin did?

There. I fixed your list xD

2 hours ago, Colin_Fredericks said:

I made a test file (attached). It only took about 5 minutes...

It is indeed noticeably slow. Typing takes quite a while to show up...

It's incredibly slow here as well. Which just duplicates my own testing of text-only documents from the beginning. I think this behavior is Reason #2 from my list as to why I'm not using APub for books...

Oh, yeah. I was also going to mention the size of the file.

APub, ~33 megs.
QXP, ~4 megs.

For plain text, APub weighs in pretty heavy.

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  • Staff

Thanks for the sample files, we do have an issue logged related to slow text entry on large flowing documents and these are all similar, I've given this issue a bump.

Quote

Oh, yeah. I was also going to mention the size of the file.

APub, ~33 megs.

This is expected, there might be some room for improvement but we save for speed over size, and write more than just text into the file (previews of the pages, etc).

If you disable "Save thumbnails with documents" in preferences this should be reduced by a fair bit, but then load times will be increased

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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Pioneering performance

Superpower your layouts with the latest and greatest publishing technology. The refreshing lack of unnecessary or obsolete features in Affinity Publisher means it runs like the sweetest dream, even on the most content-heavy documents.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/#top

10784CFB-9A7D-4E1D-85A2-2E0E5EC4F696.png.e97b418a46a0d46599f09adc4dd3db55.png

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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1 hour ago, Jon P said:

Oh, yeah. I was also going to mention the size of the file.

APub, ~33 megs.

This is expected, there might be some room for improvement but we save for speed over size, and write more than just text into the file (previews of the pages, etc)...

I am uncertain what is meant here, speed of saving or speed as in performance.

If the former, then I see no difference for the saving of a text-only document compared to ID, QXP or VD. If there are a reasonable amount of images in the same length of publication, then the performance in saving using the mentioned software is quicker to save. QXP doesn't have page thumbnails, but ID saves them as well and does so extremely quickly.

If the latter, then, well, the concept is failing because the aforementioned software blows APub out of the water.

I've mentioned this before. I tried to rebuild a 260+ page book in APub. 1-2 images and/or graphics on each page (most all images w/ transparency). There are about 5.6 gigs worth of assets. I stopped when I got to over a 2 gig APub file. The APub file would stop responding during paging through, adding text/images took ages, when saving I felt like I was back in the 1990s saving across a slow network as it would take 10 minutes or so. Generating a PDF at the state I stopped took 30 minutes or so. Etc., etc.

The ID version is about a 39 meg file. InDesign opens the full file in seconds, never hesitates or stops responding. Saves in seconds, generates a PDF in 3-5 minutes. As mentioned, it too makes page previews, saves current states, etc., etc.

So I am really at a loss as to what you mean in the highlighted quote..."some room for improvement" is an understatement.

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  • 2 months later...
  • Staff

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (Slow text entry with large text files) of the program in the latest customer beta. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below.

The latest beta builds are downloadable from links at the top of each of these beta forum posts.

These betas install parallel, next to the release version (they do not overwrite your release) and so the fixes can be tried in the beta without affecting your normal workflow in the release version.

Once these programs have been through a full beta process the change will be released in a future free 1.8.0 update/patch to all customers.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 11/20/2019 at 3:41 PM, Duncanwh said:

I have been working on a fairly long document, about 55,000 words. If I type in a sentence, perhaps just 10 words, it’s more than one and a half minutes before the sentence is entered into the page. A few corrections might mean another minute’s wait.     It’s ridiculous.  I have had to go back to InDesign on this document until something improves.

Did you ever mention what machine you are using? I had very slow performance (Almost unbearably so) on my Mac Mini Late 2012 until I started running my OS from an SSD drive. Now the programs fly open and are very responsive.  

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On 11/29/2019 at 10:47 AM, MikeW said:

speed of saving

in this case, speed of opening from what @Jon P described above...

That said I can tell you from experience that after the first save, hi-res photo files in Affinity Photo then re-save in the native Affinity format much faster than they do in PSD format.  I think how noticeable it will be depends quite a bit on the nature of what is contained in the document; one of the optimizations seems to be that the program doesn't always need to re-write parts of the document that haven't changed every time you save it?

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