Publisher Performance Issues

[ikoniqoz]

I decided to give Affinity Publisher a go as it has some nice features I needed. Previously I had been using Apple Pages on my MacBook Air.

So, I started off OK on what turned out to be a 30 page Newsletter for my club. By the time I got to around page 25~ I noticed that Publisher was slowing down. By the time I got to the end with page 31 I was getting long delays just to enter or edit some text. An example just now of entering a 4 digit number took 14 seconds, and thats a good result compared to more than 30 seconds when a few words have been typed in. It got to the point where I decided to type each word then wait for the catchup. 

For what it is worth, by comparison, I dont experience any issues with other apps including  Apple Pages, Word, Excel, Photoshop, Lightroom, or even Website dev apps such as Atom with 4 sites in the list being checked/edited. Oh - and I also have MySQL running along with MAMP Pro for Mac.

My MacBook Air is an early 2015 model with: 4GB RAM, 1.6GHz i5, Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536MB and 13" screen and an attached 2nd monitor. My hard drives include the 256GB System drive with 44GB available as well as an external attached 2TB drive which is where I currently keep my working files.

I would appreciate other's experience with a MacBook Air like mine, as well as some suggestions on what can be done to improve performance.

[carl123]

2 hours ago, ikoniqoz said:

with: 4GB RAM

That's about the minimum I would try to use with Publisher

But there could be various other reasons the Newsletter is slowing down for you. Without just guessing at various things, the easiest way to check would be if you could upload the document to the forum

Are you able to do that?

[ikoniqoz]

Thanks Carl123 for your interest. There is a lot of personal data that I will need to remove. Membership details etc.. so I will submit an edited version shortly.

[ikoniqoz]

Attached is my redacted/edited version. I had to delete content on a number of pages however, it is a little better in performance. 

I may have to dump this version of APub and move across to my Win 10 system which will be a PITA.

Thanks again for your interest.

PP4WD-MAG-2020-05-no-members.afpub

[carl123]

I can't find anything wrong with the document. Your images are not excessively large (file sizes), no problematic adjustment layers, masks etc or anything else that may cause performance problems as far as I can see.

Everything is very fast on my main Windows PC and even on one PC that is a lot slower.

So, I can only assume it is something with your Mac configuration that is causing the performance issues for you.

You could try temporally moving the file from your external drive to your internal one to see if that helps and there are some performance settings in preferences that you could try changing to get more speed rather than display quality but the Mac performance settings are a bit different to Windows so best if someone else was to advise on these if you can't figure out what each one does.

Hopefully someone with a Mac similar to yours will be along later and will be able to test on their machine to see how it performs for them

[ikoniqoz]

Hey - Thanks Carl123. I really appreciate your support and interest. I will look into moving the file to the default drive and if thats not a good option I will explore migrating to my Win10 system. Cheers.

[Old Bruce]

6 hours ago, ikoniqoz said:

I started off OK on what turned out to be a 30 page Newsletter for my club. By the time I got to around page 25~ I noticed that Publisher was slowing down. By the time I got to the end with page 31 I was getting long delays just to enter or edit some text.

I don't know if this would be adding to the problem (or if it is any kind of problem) but you haven't set a font for your Base Group Style or any of the styles that are based on that one. This might just be that I don't have the font (Calibri(?)) installed so it isn't showing up in the definitions.

Other than that I agree with Carl123 regarding the low amount of RAM. 

Have you tried working on this with the external monitor disconnected?

[ikoniqoz]

Thanks for your contribution Old Bruce. I have Body settings for the document. I didnt think that I needed anything else.  Anyhow, I will try to create a brand new document and see how I go. I will do 30 pages and fill each page with text  - after I have assigned settings for the Body. On that point there is a bit to consider for text settings.....   ... this application requires a lot of study. Its been years now since I last edited Newsletters and they were all M$ Publisher docs.

Worst case would be to junk APub and go back to Apple Pages or move across to M$ Publisher on my Win 10 system  -  and miss out on the nice that APub had to offer. 

BTW: Disconnecting the external screen made no difference (thank goodness!).  Another thing I noticed was the size of the Pub. file which is around 50MB. My Apple Pages files are typically between 15MB and 20MB.

Cheers.