GeoffW Posted November 20, 2020 Posted November 20, 2020 I seem to have pushed Publisher to its limits as it is now so slow as to be unuseable. Actually if I let the beachball spin for half an hour, as the System reports it is unresponsive, it sorts its self out and starts working again. As long as I don't close it down it seems to be OK. The document is a 180 page recipe book with lots of pictures. The images are referenced and are cell phone photographs between 1 - 2 MB The 72dpi images are placed in Picture Frames and reduced by 36% I am assuming that when I reopen the file Publisher has to recalculate all the images which overwhelms the system. The .afpub file is 9.7 MB but the exported pdf is 90.3 MB If I store the images with the file will it solve the slowdown problem and if so, is there a switch to change the storage preference? Geoff Wells
Old Bruce Posted November 20, 2020 Posted November 20, 2020 42 minutes ago, GeoffW said: is there a switch to change the storage preference? Check the Resource Manager under Document > Resource Manager and select the images and click on the embed button. EDIT forgot the screen shot Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 Affinity Designer 2.6.0 | Affinity Photo 2.6.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.6.0 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.
garrettm30 Posted November 20, 2020 Posted November 20, 2020 52 minutes ago, GeoffW said: If I store the images with the file will it solve the slowdown problem and if so, is there a switch to change the storage preference? I personally doubt it will help with slowdown. My guess is that if anything, linked is more efficient. As you asked for storage preference, this is done on a document basis via the Document Setup dialog (below pictured for an existing document). This is the preference for whether any future images are placed as linked or embedded. Old Bruce above also shows how to change already placed resources to embedded.
GeoffW Posted November 22, 2020 Author Posted November 22, 2020 After yet another backup copy, just in case, I followed Old Bruce and selected all the images and clicked the Embed button. Almost immediately the status of each image changed to embedded. I saved a new copy of the file and closed everything down. Started up Publisher beta and opened the new embedded backup. It started immediately and was totally responsive. The linked version of the file was 9.1 MB, the embedded version is 832.2 MB. The lesson I learned from this is if opening your linked file causes Publisher to become unresponsive just leave it alone for awhile. Don't force quit, just give it a chance to do all the calculations. For this file it took about 30 minutes of beachball and "This file is unresponsive" alerts. Save an embedded version and it will open without any spinning beachball.
Old Bruce Posted November 22, 2020 Posted November 22, 2020 Glad to hear you got things working. Sad to hear about the size, oof! Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 Affinity Designer 2.6.0 | Affinity Photo 2.6.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.6.0 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.
Sam Neil Posted November 23, 2020 Posted November 23, 2020 I am working on a book of 600+ pages and mainly JPG files. However I doubt I will embed the images to the size of the file. @GeoffW The trio of Affinity software (on Windows) have this very irritating 10ish second delay and become unresponsive once the application has started rendering them useless until I guess they are initialised which I don't get as the MAC version does not have this issue.
GeoffW Posted November 23, 2020 Author Posted November 23, 2020 @Sam Neil I think there should be a progress dialog as the program is opening a file that will take some time to process. When the program is totally unresponsive and all the feedback you see is the spinning beachball (Mac) the most likely response is to Force Quit and lose all your work. Your backups are useless as they will be just as bloated. We just need a dialog that says, "Stay Calm, I'm working on it" 🙂 Sam Neil 1
Sam Neil Posted November 23, 2020 Posted November 23, 2020 20 minutes ago, GeoffW said: @Sam Neil I think there should be a progress dialog as the program is opening a file that will take some time to process. When the program is totally unresponsive and all the feedback you see is the spinning beachball (Mac) the most likely response is to Force Quit and lose all your work. Your backups are useless as they will be just as bloated. We just need a dialog that says, "Stay Calm, I'm working on it" 🙂 Totally agree!!!
Staff Gabe Posted December 3, 2020 Staff Posted December 3, 2020 Hi @GeoffW, Sorry for the delayed reply. Do you mind packing the doc/files in question so we can have a look? You can use this link to upload it https://www.dropbox.com/request/Gk681kqT13xAce7IaVaD
GeoffW Posted December 5, 2020 Author Posted December 5, 2020 On 12/3/2020 at 9:54 AM, Gabe said: Hi @GeoffW, Sorry for the delayed reply. Do you mind packing the doc/files in question so we can have a look? You can use this link to upload it https://www.dropbox.com/request/Gk681kqT13xAce7IaVaD @Gabe It looks like this is ultimately a memory problem. My Macbook has 16 GB of ram but Activity Monitor showed that all used. Mac OS 11.0.1 may be part of the problem. The biggest user was the background process WindowServer. Publisher was the only app running.
deebz Posted February 20, 2021 Posted February 20, 2021 Hi @GeoffW, Have you tried splitting your book down into sections of either 16/32/64 pages? I may be telling grandma to suck eggs and I don’t know your background so don’t want to sound preachy 🙂 Offering my experience as someone who has a) worked in publishing and b) has designed books. It is more usual to work in these smaller numbers of page sizes. Rather than all the pages together. Similarly cover designs are done as a separate file to insides/sections. i think even the likes of indesign and Quark would struggle with a very long page count Hope this helps and best of luck
GeoffW Posted February 22, 2021 Author Posted February 22, 2021 On 2/20/2021 at 2:48 PM, deebz said: Hi @GeoffW, Have you tried splitting your book down into sections of either 16/32/64 pages? I may be telling grandma to suck eggs and I don’t know your background so don’t want to sound preachy 🙂 Offering my experience as someone who has a) worked in publishing and b) has designed books. It is more usual to work in these smaller numbers of page sizes. Rather than all the pages together. Similarly cover designs are done as a separate file to insides/sections. i think even the likes of indesign and Quark would struggle with a very long page count Hope this helps and best of luck Hi @deebz, I'm guessing you are talking about traditional publishing whereas I'm publishing to Amazon which requires a single pdf. Anyhow, everything is fine now. The book is published and I've moved on to the next project. I think the problem was with the early version of OS11, insufficient RAM and the WindowsServer background process as I explained above.
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