What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

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Ken
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by Ken »

Okay, I have tried everything. I cannot use RTF as the transitional file format because it does not preserve styles. The DOC format does preserve styles and it also renders better when it is in Nisus. After I save it from Nisus, of course, there is no loss in the styles or the formatting.

I exported a document from Pages to DOC (brief delay) and opened it in Nisus (four minutes). I zapped the gremlins; there weren't any in the file at all. I saved the file as Nisus' format and reopened it, four minutes.

The bottom line is that Nisus is just too slow.
ProfT
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by ProfT »

The bottom line is that Nisus is just too slow.
I'm inclined to think that it is not Nisus, in general, but rather that there is some aspect of the file in question that Nisus is not handling well.

Why would I hazard such a guess? Because I have a dissertation chapter that is approximately 20,000 words (73 pages) with Hebrew, Greek, German, French, and English. There are different fonts for the Hebrew and Greek. It has over 150 footnotes (about 5,000 of the 20,000 words are in the footnotes) with some that span the page break. It also has tables, images, etc. It meets all the criteria for being a document that should choke NWP if it's just too slow. But it doesn't. I work exclusively in page view so I'm asking it to do the full layout always. It opens, saves, navigates from place to place, and edits in any part of the file with no discernible slowness. It opens in 2.5 seconds.

This leads me to think that most of the slowness issues are not due to "complexity", or even to length, but to some specific feature of the text that isn't handled well, not that NWP is too slow.
exegete77
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by exegete77 »

In contrast I have a NWP document that is only 10 pages in length, one style, one font, rarely edited (I need the info often, though) and at times it takes 3-4 seconds to text set before opening.
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greenmorpher
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by greenmorpher »

Ken wrote:Okay, I have tried everything. I cannot use RTF as the transitional file format because it does not preserve styles. The DOC format does preserve styles and it also renders better when it is in Nisus. After I save it from Nisus, of course, there is no loss in the styles or the formatting.

I exported a document from Pages to DOC (brief delay) and opened it in Nisus (four minutes). I zapped the gremlins; there weren't any in the file at all. I saved the file as Nisus' format and reopened it, four minutes.

The bottom line is that Nisus is just too slow.
Four minutes. No, the bottom line, Ken, is that there is something bizarre going on here. NWP on my test files with MANY fonts takes seconds.

Four minutes is simply so far outside the bounds of what everyone else is getting that there is obviously something very odd going on on your machine.

Anyway, ce la vie (or whatever!). Go thy way and enjoy it. Obviously NWP is not for you.

Cheers, geoff
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xiamenese
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by xiamenese »

Ken wrote:Okay, I have tried everything. I cannot use RTF as the transitional file format because it does not preserve styles.
There is a problem with losing footnotes when you save out to .docx from Nisus and from Scrivener using the third party converters, but apart from that, in my experirence RTF most definitely preserves styles.

And I’ve never found Nisus to be so slow loading files … even lengthy ones, taking more than a few seconds that it has caused me any frustration.

I’d be looking at what else you have loaded on your machine that is causing your problems.
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greenmorpher
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by greenmorpher »

xiamenese wrote:I’d be looking at what else you have loaded on your machine that is causing your problems.
Or maybe the machine itself -- a hand-cranked 68000 with 128KB RAM and a single 400KB disk. :)

Cheers, geoff
Ken
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by Ken »

I haven't posted anything since no one had a clue what the problem was or how to fix it, but I want to wrap it up.

My computer is a late 2013 27" iMac with a 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7. It has 32 GM of memory and no modifications to OS X Mavericks. I also have a mid 2012 Retina MacBook Pro with 16 GB of memory. The file has four fonts. There is no third-party font-management software and there are no hardware problems.

I exported the file as a text file, it had no gremlins. The text file opened instantly in Nisus. I reconstructed the formatting. I saved the file. It took 4 minutes and 11 seconds for Nisus to open it on both computers. On both computers.

There is a absolutely nothing wrong with the computer or the file. The people on this forum are insulting and unkind, Nisus is silent, and I'm out $50 bucks. I'll keep it on my computers just in case Nisus figures it out and fixes it. Meanwhile, I'm glad that Nisus works fine for you, but for me it is completely unusable.
NisusUser
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by NisusUser »

Ken wrote:There is a absolutely nothing wrong with the computer or the file. The people on this forum are insulting and unkind, Nisus is silent […]
Ken, I'm sorry you've had such a bad experience. I find it strange that an official Nisus person hasn't jumped into this, since someone usually does. They might be willing to help you if you would you be willing to Scramble (or, redact) the file (with the attached macro) so none of your data is in it and then would send it to them via Help > Send Feedback. I agree that there is nothing wrong with the file that we know of (based on the hoops you've jumped through with it already), but maybe there's something hidden that only a true RTF specialist would recognize. The Nisus folks are true specialists with RTF. It's worth a try. And maybe you'll get some benefit from the money spent. I wish you well in solving this problem.
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Patrick J
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Re: What is Nisus doing when it is "typesetting text"?

Post by Patrick J »

Ken wrote:The people on this forum are insulting and unkind, Nisus is silent, and I'm out $50 bucks.
There has been one individual who has been a bit silly.

Other people have been creating very large documents themselves and trying things out on your behalf to see if they can assist in this.

I think you need to email Nisus directly about this. Then maybe if there is no resolution they can refund the money for the application.

Personally I don't think you should keep data in a file of that size in any case but you have made it clear that you are not interested in looking at other ways of storing this data so there is no way ahead on that.
Patrick
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