Publisher extremely slow on long documents

[LFGabel]

I have begin using Publisher to layout novels. However, speed issues are really slowing me down, especially on text that is flowing over hundreds of pages.

Other aspects of the application are slow as well, not just text entry. Selecting fonts and sizes, applying styles, and changing visual options like showing/hiding baseline grid is so slow, a force quit is required.

The below video shows a text entry example with a file that has virtually no graphics. It is mostly text, 503 pages long. To show the difference in performance, I first type into a single non-linked text frame. Everything works as expected. However, editing text in a linked text frame, the lag between characters appearing onscreen is almost ten seconds, per character. In fact, during that time Windows thinks the application has become unresponsive. It is really difficult to work like this. 

Any ideas? Is this a bug or just me? I hope it's a setting on my computer I can change.

Demonstration of slow performance (Youtube Unlisted video)

Affinity Publisher 1.7.2
Windows 10 Home
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz
16GB Memory
2TB HDD / 128GB SSD

[Pauls]

Could you upload the file here

I'll see if we get the same performance. Is there a lot of disk activity when the slow typing is occurring ?

 

 

[Oval]

Welcome here in the forums, LFGabel.

[LFGabel]

Hi Pauls,

I'll put together a file for you.

And thank you for the welcome, Oval.

[LFGabel]

Pauls, I have uploaded an .afpub file and a screen grab of my system processes. There doesn't appear to be any intensive disk activity or CPU action.

One additional piece of information, the original file size of the Word document was about 500KB (docx) or 9MB (rtf). The novel is about 137,000 words. Not sure if that helps.

With thanks,
Lee

[lacerto]

(...)

[Wosven]

Yes, same problem here on a 250 pages document with only vectors for decoration on the master pages. The app is slow and the file is huge for no reason (when compared to using other apps).

[LFGabel]

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

My experience is  the same with any longer document (one consisting of several hundreds of pages), even with mere text. The experience may be further deteriorated with a mutliple monitor system and a graphic driver that does not support acceleration. I would just split the long document in parts (you can start page numbering at specific number, but would need to do certain jobs multiple times, of course, for each separate section of the book).

If you need to have one pdf, then you'd need do use a tool like Debenu PDF Tools (free) to combine multiple pdfs, or purchase a professional PDF editor for more complex tasks. 

Thanks for the suggestions, Lagarto. Appreciated!

With thanks,
Lee

[Tegwyn]

@LFGabelThis doesn't quite match your video, but for what it's worth, I found that turning off baseline grid fixed performance in my 400-page project. If I have baseline grid on, and flowing text frames (even empty ones) on most of the pages, the CPU hangs out in the 60-99% range forever, and the program is very sluggish to do anything. It sounds like your case didn't have high CPU, but I'm curious if turning baseline grid off changes anything for you. For me, it churns for a few seconds to make the change when I turn it off, then settles down and stays responsive.

[LFGabel]

Hi @Tegwyn,

As I recall, I did have the baseline grid on. Not displayed, but enabled. Turning it off is not an option for me because snapping to baseline and having lines line up between spreads increases the reader experience. 

With thanks,
Lee

[Tegwyn]

I hear you. I'm doing an awkward workaround where I set the text frame to align text to the bottom (so it lines up by baseline instead of font caps) and auto-balance text between columns, then making sure all my paragraph styles have leading + spacing multiples of my body text leading. Unfortunately, it means I'll have to do manual adjustment on pages that end up with extra or uneven space at the top.

[Angalanse]

I have the same problem. It is amended by turning off baseline grids, but baseline grids are necessary for longer texts. Is this something that will be fixed or optimized? I feel a bit apprehensive to start up a more extensive project in Publisher at this moment, which means that I need to revert to InDesign for now.

[LFGabel]

Angalanse, you might want to try breaking up your document into smaller blocks of text (chapters) until they isolate and squash this problem. I'll be trying that with my next book but I won't be doing that for a few months. InDesign is not an option for me any longer.

With thanks,
Lee

[Tegwyn]

@Angalanse For what it's worth, after my post, I ended up breaking it up into a different text flow for each chapter, and it helped enough for me to turn baseline grid back on. I was worried that splitting it up would break hyperlinks, but it did not. I went to each chapter break, selected the start of that chapter plus Ctrl+Shift+End (to select from there to the end of the text flow), cut, disconnected the text frame from the previous one, then pasted again. You might find this works for you if you have any spots where there is a clean split between pages (like a chapter title).

[Angalanse]

Thanks for the advice LFGabel and Tegwyn! I'm still a bit concerned whether this slowdown, at such an early stage of the work-process, is indicative of additional problems further on (such as when adding large images). Have you experienced such problems, if I may ask?

[Tegwyn]

Overall, I think you should be fine. Details about my experience:

The only image-based slowdown I've run into is when I used an image directly rather than placing it in a frame, and I set its wrapping to tight. The automatic wrapping outline had a very large number of nodes, and that chapter became sluggish. (I believe they have plans to fix this.) Things improved when I deleted most of the nodes to simplify the wrap outline. When I've put the images in frames and made the wrap outline myself, it's been fine.

Every once in awhile, a change will take a long time to compute, and certain things are likely to cause crashes for me, such as editing global swatches (fixed in beta) or undoing and redoing table stuff. Saving takes awhile on my large project. (Also fixed in the beta version: be careful about placing docx files with tables and changing tables between pinned and unpinned. I've had that (apparently) corrupt my files before. If you're better than I am about saving new versions of your file frequently, then you won't have to redo as much if this happens. I'll be switching to the beta to keep this from happening again.)

Publisher is generally a little laggy, but workable for me. I'm on a mid-range machine, so it might just be my computer.

It's worth noting that most users don't seem to be encountering the issues I've mentioned. I've got a wimpier computer and a complicated document, so I don't want to scare you off. Publisher is a very cool program.

[LFGabel]

Angalanse, I'd listen to Tegwyn. Sounds like great advice.

I can't offer much as I use Publisher to lay out novels and they usually have little to no images in them.

With thanks,
Lee

[Angalanse]

Thanks for the thorough answer Tegwyn, I really appreciate it! I'm not scared off. For this particular project, I nevertheless chose to go back to InDesign, but mostly as I still have overlapping licences. I'm a proponent for Publisher, and often endorse it at work, where me and my colleagues mostly use it for scientific posters, pamphlets and questionnaires. I will give it another try next time I work with relatively short books such as theses. My current project is a clear deviation by being over 800 pages long. If I run into troubles at a late stage, much work will have been in vain.

[Patrick Connor]

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (Slow text entry with large text files) of the program in the latest customer beta. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below.

The latest beta builds are downloadable from links at the top of each of these beta forum posts.

• Affinity Publisher 1.8.0.556 for Windows
• Affinity Publisher 1.8.0.556 for Mac

These betas install parallel, next to the release version (they do not overwrite your release) and so the fixes can be tried in the beta without affecting your normal workflow in the release version.

Once these programs have been through a full beta process the change will be released in a future free 1.8.0 update/patch to all customers.

[adrm]

On 2/17/2020 at 5:24 PM, Patrick Connor said:

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (Slow text entry with large text files) of the program in the latest customer beta. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below.

Patrick, I tested beta .556 with my standard plain ASCII test-file (TheBible.txt) and unfortunately this version doesn't seem to offer much in the way of performance improvements.

1) Affinity Pub beta .556

2) Set page format 6"x9"

3) Define text frames in double spread master

4) Place TheBible.text in text frame on page 1

5) Click to Autoflow text

6) Wait 5+ minutes while APu uses 97% CPU to autoflow

7) Go to last page and right click on it, and select Delete.  Wait 2-3 minutes with the UI frozen.

 

Admittedly, at 6"x9" this text results in 3400+ pages, so it's at the extreme end of things, but still ...

Strangely, forcing a re-flow of text by deleting a bunch of text on the first page is very snappy.

However, minimising the program to the taskbar is also sluggish.

[Steve "Ed"]

Hello,

I have had type lag and slightly weird laggy graphics tablet  issues with a pdf about 40meg in size - nothing strange with a brand new document.

Tracking back and have tested this for 10 mins this morning, I have a solution that works for me.

I stopped having the HYPERLINKS panel open. Closed it and everything I type appears immediately.

I repeated opening and closing this panel and each time I closed it, typing was spot on and no laggy dragging with my Wacom Graphics tablet.(small Intuos Blue Tooth)

The panel has a mix of well over 60 links from URLS to Anchors - each page of the pdf has a link back to contents page - about 50 pages at present.

I have a 2012 upgraded iMac (16 meg RAM), running High Sierra as latest incarnations wont run my favourite software and the toys there are not really needed by me.

The solution seems constant with repeatable results.  - I hope this helps someone out there.

techie bit: with Hyperlinks panel showing, very laggy with cpu = 100%, with solution - cpu drops to around 50% - and I have stopped swearing!

Result.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Steve "Ed" said:

Hello,

I have had type lag and slightly weird laggy graphics tablet  issues with a pdf about 40meg in size - nothing strange with a brand new document.

Tracking back and have tested this for 10 mins this morning, I have a solution that works for me.

I stopped having the HYPERLINKS panel open. Closed it and everything I type appears immediately.

I repeated opening and closing this panel and each time I closed it, typing was spot on and no laggy dragging with my Wacom Graphics tablet.(small Intuos Blue Tooth)

The panel has a mix of well over 60 links from URLS to Anchors - each page of the pdf has a link back to contents page - about 50 pages at present.

I have a 2012 upgraded iMac (16 meg RAM), running High Sierra as latest incarnations wont run my favourite software and the toys there are not really needed by me.

The solution seems constant with repeatable results.  - I hope this helps someone out there.

techie bit: with Hyperlinks panel showing, very laggy with cpu = 100%, with solution - cpu drops to around 50% - and I have stopped swearing!

Result.

You have posted this in an old topic, dealing with a prior release of the program. It does look interesting, but it might be better to post a new topic in the current Publisher Bugs found on Windows forum. That will allow better tracking, and help ensure that it gets fixed.

[KateCM]

This is true for me too. It also keeps freezing and no amount of waiting lets it catch up. 200 pages 18600 KB as a PDF is all it takes to bog down. It freezes and I have to restart my computer for it to work again. (Windows 10, 12G RAM so what's up?)

[walt.farrell]

On 6/21/2021 at 2:35 PM, KateCM said:

This is true for me too. It also keeps freezing and no amount of waiting lets it catch up. 200 pages 18600 KB as a PDF is all it takes to bog down. It freezes and I have to restart my computer for it to work again. (Windows 10, 12G RAM so what's up?)

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

As I mentioned above, this is an old topic, and your problem may be different. I would recommend starting a new topic in the current Questions or Bugs forum.

I will also mention that the 1.10 Beta of Publisher has a focus on performance, so it may be worthwhile for you to install it alongside your current 1.9 version and test whether it has improved things. You can download it from the Publisher Beta forum for your OS, from a topic pinned near the top of the forum.

 

[Anne-C.]

We have the same problem here at the office.  The file is really laggy and only use the RAM (see attach). I have 32GB RAM an  I can open the file but it is really slow, my college which has only 16GB can't open the file anymore. On your website is written that 4GB should be enough. So I think the problem is not the computer.

Is there anyway too show the picture as " fast display" or to tell Affinity he has to use the CPU and the GPU?