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Jittery scrolling in long documents


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I'm using 1.7.0.292 on Mojave 10.14.4 on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)

I decided to 'stress test' Publisher, so I created a 'type specimen' book for the typefaces I use. It's a few hundred pages, with a separate font/style on each page (e.g. page 20 is Baskerville Regular, page 21 is Baskerville Italic, and so on). Each page shows a character map for the basic keyboard glyphs plus a couple paragraphs of 'Lorem ipsum" so I can see the colour of text set in that font.

I created it several weeks ago in an older beta. Once I got beyond a certain page count the scrolling became very jittery, with lots of screen tearing. When I try to scroll a long way through the document Publisher takes a couple of seconds to catch up. It's never locked-up or crashed--which is kind of remarkable for a beta, given what I was asking it to do--but the problem is still occurring in the latest beta, so I thought I'd mention it.

[Granted, almost no one is going to try to stuff all the variants of 90+ typefaces into a single document, so this is probably an edge case. And, although my machine is (was) a high-end model with a separate graphics card, it is also five years old. My hardware may be part of the problem. I don't think it's entirely the hardware, though. I don't use it for, say, 4K video editing, but it works fine for everything short of that.]

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Hi CJRM,

Is there chance you can attach the file here? I've tried a few stress documents and can't seem to get it too slow on some reasonably specced machines.I'm interested to see how it performs on a few machines here.

Thanks!

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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Hi @CJRM,

Thanks for supplying that file. I have a 2016 Macbook pro running 10.14.4.

I noticed that when setting the Display to use OpenGL it was considerably smoother than using Metal (Edit > Preferences > Performance). Which one are you using?

Either way I think Metal shouldn't be considerably slower than OpenGL here so am going to log that to be looked into further.

 

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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1 hour ago, Jon P said:

Either way I think Metal shouldn't be considerably slower than OpenGL here so am going to log that to be looked into further.

After a quick look I have to say that the only difference I noticed was that with Metal I would get the outline of the pages appearing as black horizontal lines as I scrolled. (Is this what you meant by "Tearing" @CJRM ?). Subjectively it may have been slower to have pages come into 'focus' with Metal but it was no longer than it took me to read the page number, just long enough to notice. 

I wonder if all the font substitutions (maybe 99% here) had much effect. Most of the book is in one font on my machine.

What sort of script did you use to generate that? Or did you do it by hand.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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Hi @Jon P

I hadn't adjusted any of those settings, so it was on the defaults. In this case, Metal.

@Old Bruce By 'tearing' I was referring to 'screen tearing' as the gaming community uses the term. It's where the graphic card can't keep up with the changes requested by the app (game) and you see part or all of the screen distort and warp, looking a bit like a piece of paper being ripped. You also see it when fast-forwarding video.

My guess (and it was only a guess) was that it was the number of fonts/styles in use rather than the number of pages that was causing my GPU to lose the plot. *If* that's true, then substituting all the fonts would have removed the issue.

I didn't use a script to generate it, although that would have been faster. It was just endless cut-and-paste and then change a couple things on each page.

 

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12 hours ago, CJRM said:

It was just endless cut-and-paste and then change a couple things on each page.

Sigh, I was afraid of that. Although for the smaller number of fonts that I have it shouldn't take too long. Is it okay with you if I steal your idea and make my own sample book?

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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