v2 Preview - It Takes Forever

[Didge]

There's really no polite way to say this - I hate the Preview in the export dialog.

When I tried to export my current document - which is only 50 pages - it took thirty seconds to build the preview for a PNG,
and more than five minutes to build a preview for GIF.

In case anyone might think that my Mac is too slow, it's a very fast Mac Studio running MacOS 13.

IMHO the preview is completely pointless - the best way to preview a document is to look at the exported document.
And I know I can just click the 'Export' button to abort the preview.

But some users like it, so for those who do want the Preview, it should render the first page in 5 ms - not 5 minutes.
And - for those of us who don't want it - at least there should be a pref to switch the preview off.

Attached is a movie of the export for anyone prepared to watch it - I gave up after waiting 5 minutes for the GIF preview.

 

 

 

[deeds]

5 hours ago, Gary.JONES said:

IMHO the preview is completely pointless - the best way to preview a document is to look at the exported document.

^^^THIS^^^

 

Reaper, on a Mac, immediately after Rendering (Exporting) an Audio clip/stem, offers up a popup asking if you'd like to go see the file in Finder (Return key is this option), or preview it right here and now, or drop it into the current project, or just continue - which is the default action if you press escape.

This wonderful courtesy is reason enough to love working with Reaper. It just feels like they GET the audio workflow. 

MIDI... not so much, but Audio... yes!

[Didge]

11 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

I agree, the preview is slow. As such it doesn't serve much purpose. Perhaps in other circumstances it is useful but so far I have found it to have no use.

It is even slow in the "What's New in Affinity Publisher 2" official video around the 28 minute mark: 

 

 

Oh dear ...

So - in an Affinity training video - the preview for a simple PDF still had not rendered the first page after 36 seconds.

To be fair, rendering probably reset when the presenter re-selected PDF from the dropdown menu - but still ... way too long.

[deeds]

To the best of my knowledge, the PDF export preview feature in browsers is the same as Affinity are using, in that it's VERY slow.

 

The fastest good export of PDF I've ever seen, that also has wonderful optimisation features, is within the ColorSync Utility on a Mac.

 

If it saves anyone time, you can export fully uncompressed PDFs faster from any creative app, and then compress it in ColorSync Unity, getting better (and smaller) results.

[Catshill]

No it’s not good is it. I too have come to the conclusion that the V2 preview panel is a retrograde step.

[NotMyFault]

Preview has been slow ever, but V2 added even more slowness:

• palletized formats are unbearable slow
• preview at least takes the same tame as the actual export itself (has been reported before in V1)
• even calculating the estimated export size takes the same time as exporting

[NotMyFault]

23 hours ago, Gary.JONES said:

IMHO the preview is completely pointless - the best way to preview a document is to look at the exported document.
And I know I can just click the 'Export' button to abort the preview.

Unfortunately yes in the current state, but is has some (undelivered) use cases:

• show effect of export conversions like palletizing, color depth reduction, color format reduction
• Allow to choose a matting color for transparent areas live
• getting an accurate rendering (live, no wait).

I have a feature request describing some use cases

 

[Didge]

Rather that waiting for APub2 to render a preview, it's much faster to do a print preview - select 'Print', then 'Open in Preview'.

The document I described in my original post, for which APub2 took 30 seconds to render a preview, opened in Print Preview in less than 1 second - all 50 pages.

Another confounding feature of APub preview - it displays only the first page - which is completely useless if you want to preview the whole document - or anything more than the first page.

[Didge]

7 hours ago, deeds said:

To the best of my knowledge, the PDF export preview feature in browsers is the same as Affinity are using, in that it's VERY slow.

The fastest good export of PDF I've ever seen, that also has wonderful optimisation features, is within the ColorSync Utility on a Mac.

If it saves anyone time, you can export fully uncompressed PDFs faster from any creative app, and then compress it in ColorSync Unity, getting better (and smaller) results.

Yes - but ColorSync is only useful if you want to resample images or compress the document to reduce file size - it doesn't provide a preview as such, because you still have to export your APub2 document to something that ColorSync can read - it just involves another step.

I haven't compared the quality of ColorSync compression vs the optimisation settings in Affinity export, that would be interesting to see.

IMHO, it would be difficult to beat Adobe Distiller when it comes to compressing documents - I keep an old MacMini to run 32 bits apps for things like this /:o

[tudor]

Affinity, please add an option to hide the Preview window completely. It is useless.

[Didge]

4 hours ago, tudor said:

Affinity, please add an option to hide the Preview window completely. It is useless.

Agree that !