Large document drag

[soliphint]

Maybe I'll be ignored in this post, as I was in the last...But I have a document of around 90,000 words and I am adding footnotes to it. Not only is the character typing delayed, but I am getting numerous rotating beach ball pauses in the midst of it. Is there any way to speed this up?

[NisusUser]

Maybe use Help>Send Feedback to send the file to Nisus Support and see if they can tell you anything? If the text is confidential, there is a "Scramble" macro here, or perhaps the "Redact" one in the same thread would meet your needs: http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f= ... w=previous.

[goldste4]

Hello Soliphint,

A bunch of us who regularly use NWP2 for writing (especially academic writing) have experienced this problem (see http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f= ... hilit=slow). I'm not convinced that the problem has as much to do with the length of file but with some peculiarity with how NWP2 or the Apple text engine calculates how the page should be laid out—but I'm just speculating wildly at this point. I regularly (but thankfully not frequently) have this problem with files of about 8–12K words (and in fact just had this problem yesterday: waited about a minute while NWP slowly placed each character of a quickly inputted sentence of material up on to the screen — about a second or two delay between each buffered keystroke). When the problem does occur, it is almost always on pages with footnotes (for me) and lasts for a line or two and then everything returns to normal. Switching to draft view fixes things, but if you are working with footnotes that isn't really a workable solution.

I've been in contact with Martin at Nisus about this before and have sent him files and exact locations where the problem has occurred. He has been a fantastic help with diagnosing other little problems and bugs with NWP — really just top notch support — when I've had trouble with files that I needed to get to the editor, but I've never heard back about this problem. Again, speculating wildly, I'd guess that this slowness is of a more systemic nature (a problem caused by relying on Apple's text engine?) and this is the reason there has been no fix yet.

Josh

[martin]

I have a document of around 90,000 words and I am adding footnotes to it. Not only is the character typing delayed, but I am getting numerous rotating beach ball pauses in the midst of it. Is there any way to speed this up?

Josh has the right of this: sluggishness with footnotes can be caused by certain text layout situations in Page View, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the total length of your document. Some slowness might occur when typing in documents containing a lot of footnotes per page/line, and when widow & orphan control forces a particular line of text with a footnote reference to the next page.

As Josh says, working in Draft View avoids these problems, but may not be a feasible solution. Turning off widow & orphan control can also help; if you do that, I'd recommend you adjust your Normal paragraph style to disable the feature.

[soliphint]

Thanks for the helpful responses.