Document incredibly slow/unresponsive

[J_SL]

I created a document that was only 68pages and 61MB, with roughly one high resolution raster jpeg per page. There are also a few vector pdfs. All of these were linked and not embedded.

The document was incredibly slow to start up and to use, whether scrolling through the pages or editing text/replacing links. And I would generally have to end task through task manager to close the file after saving, as it would just freeze/become unresponsive.

The document became unworkable so I had to split it into 4 smaller documents of around 15-20 pages, but even still it wasn't that quick to navigate through.

Its a new i7 laptop running Windows 10 with 16GB RAM and plenty of hard disk space which is very fast on all other programs so the hardware isn't the issue.

So I'm at a loss as to why this was.

I checked online to try and reduce the display performance like on InDesign which I thought would make it quicker, but I don't think publisher has this option.

Any thoughts/advice?

I'm using Affinity Publisher version 1.9.2.1035

[Joachim_L]

Welcome to the Affinity forums @J_SL!

1. Are graphic drivers and Windows up-to-date?

2. Turning off Snapping or reducing the options could help.

3. Turn off Show Samples in Text Styles panel or generally everything that renders in real time. I attached a Studio Preset with no panels just for testing. Copy the unzipped folder to C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Publisher\1.0\Workspaces\Custom\Publisher

4. My setting in Preferences >> Performance is View Quality = Nearest Neighbour, Use precise clipping unchecked, Retina Rendering = Low quality and enabled hardware acceleration. Works fine for me on my average machine.

Texteditor.zip

[J_SL]

Hi Joachim,

Thanks for the speedy reply!

1. Yes the graphic drivers are up to date.
2. I've turned off a couple of the snapping options but need to keep snap to guides/margins to align the images properly
3. I've found that and turned it off. There isn't much text in the document though so it might not make much of a difference.
4. Great, that's what I was looking for. That seems to have helped. I noticed there is also an option to limit the RAM usage, would you recommend reducing that (currently at 16GB)? When I was struggling with the file the other day Publisher was using over 10GB of RAM at some points which seems excessive. It seems to average at around 5GB.

Also, is there a way to link multiple publisher files into a book? So for large documents that need to be split into chapters, you can export the pdf as one book? 

Thanks for the help

[Joachim_L]

7 minutes ago, J_SL said:

Also, is there a way to link multiple publisher files into a book? So for large documents that need to be split into chapters, you can export the pdf as one book?

Unfortunately not (yet).

9 minutes ago, J_SL said:

would you recommend reducing that (currently at 16GB)?

My common setting is -2 GB of the available RAM. So for me 6 instead of 8 GB. I have to confess, that I made not enough test to evaluate the best setting.