Publisher, Book mit 300 pages, slow slow slow

[StefanGold]

I have a book with about 300 pages. When I open it, scroll to page 290 and want to select the text, NOTHING happens.

At first I thought it was a bug, I click and click..... and suddenly 3 seconds later it works.

I scroll back to page 10, the same thing again, delays of 2 to 3, sometimes 5 seconds.

Basically I'm working slower here than on my 10 year old MBP with Indesign.

I have a MacBook Pro M1 with 16GB

No, I can't attach the file, it's a client's book.

Regards

Stefan

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

Ich habe ein Buch mit ca. 300 Seiten. Wenn ich das öffne, auf Seite 290 scrolle und den Text selektieren möchte, passiert NICHTS.

Erst dachte ich an einen Bug, ich klicke und klicke..... und plötzlich 3 Sekunden später geht es.

Ich scrolle zurück auf Seite 10, das Gleiche nochmal, Verzögerungen von 2 bis 3, manchmal 5 Sekunden.

Im Grunde arbeite ich hier langsamer als auf meinem 10 Jahre alten MBP mit Indesign.

Habe MacBook Pro M1 mit 16GB

Nein, ich kann die Datei nicht anhängen, es ist ein Buch eines Kunden.

Grüße

Stefan

[MikeTO]

Hi Stefan, I'm not experiencing this issue with an M1 Pro with 16MB of memory with a very complex and longer book than you're working on.

Is there anything unusual about this book?

Is it a single story (one series of linked frames) or multiple stories (one series for each chapter)? I'm not talking about dividing your book into a .afbook "Book" with multiple "Chapter" files).

For a complex book it's a best practice to break a story into multiple stories. This is because when you make a change the app doesn't have to re-flow text for as many pages. However, you're reporting that it's slow at the end of the book so I doubt breaking a single story into multiple stories would make a difference for you - that approach tends to improve performance in the earlier part of a story, not the end.

What are your performance settings? Go to Affinity Publisher 2 > Settings and click Performance in the left pane. Ensure that you deselect Hardware Acceleration > Enable Metal, and change Display from Metal to OpenGL. Publisher works much better on an M1 with these settings. My settings look like this:

[StefanGold]

Hi Mike,

i already changed my settings to your suggestions a few weeks ago.

The book is just one story without anything special...

The only special thing is the fact that it is imported from Indesign

 

[MikeTO]

Hi Stefan. I'm sorry, I don't have a suggestion for you so perhaps somebody else or Serif will come along with a better idea. I can't think of anything that would cause this sort of slowdown on an M1.

If you're on Sonoma, it might have some memory handling issues compared to Ventura. Ventura handled my 16GB of memory well, everything paged in and out of memory seamlessly so I never noticed it happening in the background. With Sonoma, I do notice it and do get occasional 3-5 second freezes but that's not Affinity, it's Sonoma, and it happens for me in other apps, too. I hope this gets addressed in a future Sonoma update.

[StefanGold]

Hi Mike,

i' m on Monterey and will be there for a while!

Well, there are many other problems with the Affinity apps and so maybe in some future... maybe?!

[Bit Disappointed]

This reminds me that I miss a story editor / text persona in Publisher for working with text and styles exclusively with great performance and total focus on the actual text which is key when working on text heavy documents also in the DTP stages and finalizing stages.

[Callum]

Hi StefanGold,

Please could you tell me roughly how many images you have in your file and if they are embedded or linked? Please could you also tell me the file size of your Affinity project file?

Thanks
C

[StefanGold]

Hi,

there is only one image linked with 115 kb

The file size is 1,3 MB

it was imported from idml

[thomaso]

Did the .afpub behave like this from its initial .idml import – or caused by any later step?

Possible workarounds:

• Create a new empty .afpub with same page dimensions and colours space, then choose menu Document > Add Pages From File… and select the affected .afpub for import.
-> This workflow sometimes helps to fix issues, e.g. with .afpubs that don't open but cause a 'corruption' error message.

• Select all text of the entire book (I assume it's a long story of linked text frames), then cut the text, paste it into a new TextEdit document, select there all text again and copy/paste back to the .afpub. If this doesn't help you could also try the process via TextEdit with a plain text file (.txt, not .rtf), while this way you will of cause lose any formatting.
-> This might help if the .idml contained a special character or formatting that APub can't handle properly, there are reports in the forum about Word.docs that cause issues if placed directly. Also I wonder what can happen with ID's GREP styles in APub (e.g., are they simply ignored or may they create any unexpected data within an .afpub?) If this workflow helps to avoid your current issue it could indicate that any special character within the text flow would influence the problem and you could try to detect the culprit to change this part within your initial but affected .afpub.