large document limitations?

[innlaeufer]

I have come to Nisus only recently, and right now trying out my first larger document (about 400 pages). It is text only, no graphics or tables, and Nisus Pro crashes pretty consistently, particularly if I try to alter a style.

Not good – is there any help, or do others have the same experience with this? I would hate to go back to Mellel, which I never really understood well.

BR

[shades]

Howdy and welcome. I use both Nisus and Mellel and have never had any problem.

With Nisus I have opened and edited documents up to 280 pages without any crashing. How as it saved?

[innlaeufer]

The document is collected of chapters originally created with Word for Windows as rtf-documents; I collated them in Nisus on a MBP with 4GB Ram under Leopard.

BR

[Groucho]

Nisus Writer Pro has no limit to document sizes. The largest one I have used was the King James Version, some 1800 pages.
I think you had best send the document to the Nisus via the Help menu, along with a short explanation.

Cheers, Henry.

[dshan]

I knew God had to have a ghostwriter, but I didn't know his name was Henry...

[Groucho]

To be true, I didn't expect the book to sell so well.

Henry.

[MacSailor]

You really made my day, Groucho and dshan. Very funny indeed.

[Timotheus]

I'm sorry I have to say this, but in my experience (and it's not the experience of a fortnight) for large documents, with tons of footnotes ecc., Mellel is a much better choice than Nisus. Much more stable, much more responsive.

[Jester]

That happens to me too. My computer is not so fast and I definitely need to upgrade, but the programme becomes slower with larger documents (at least in my case).

[LongTermUser]

Yes, I consistently have very slow response with large documents. The answer I get from Nisus is to send them my document. Since these are not releasable I can not send the file. Since this problem has been reported many many times, it time to stop asking for the sample document and fix the problem.

Somewhat of a complaint-Lorenz

[Anne Cuneo]

I also wrote whole books (over one million signs sometimes) in one single file without the slightest hitch.
And I recently collected half Goethe's works in one (huge) file too… No problem.
The documents are slightly slower than 2-3 pages ones, but to the point of irritating me.

[Groucho]

I notice a lag when I open a huge file (usually 50,000+ words) which has been saved in page view. Everything that involves a pagination process (like adding/removing chunks of text, shifting between views, and changing layout settings) requires a new pagination, hence the lag. I think this is a limit of the layout engine, which is Apple's and was thought for simple applications, like TextEdit. I shift to draft view whenever I can.

Greetings, Henry.

[dshan]

Yes, I consistently have very slow response with large documents. The answer I get from Nisus is to send them my document. Since these are not releasable I can not send the file. Since this problem has been reported many many times, it time to stop asking for the sample document and fix the problem.

Somewhat of a complaint-Lorenz

As you can see from several of the previous posters not everyone has problems with large document performance. It seems like it must be something about your particular document(s) that's causing a problem for NWP. That's why Nisus need to see one of them, so they can reproduce the problem. If they can't reproduce the problem they can't fix it. It would also be useful if you mentioned what type of Mac with how much RAM and what version of Mac OS X you're using.

Do your troublesome documents contain many footnotes, endnotes, tables, graphics or other such formatting? From what I've seen previously those who find large document performance acceptable usually seem to have documents with pretty simple formatting (the Bible for example is, perhaps unfortunately, not heavily footnoted and I don't recall too many tables in it either. Ditto for Goethe I suspect), whereas those who report problems with larger documents sometimes mention they have many footnotes, tables, styles or other such things in their big documents. I suspect the performance issues that are reported by some users have less to do with simple document size than a combination of document size and document structure. Unfortunately the users having performance problems usually say they cannot possibly send a sample document to Nisus and so the issue never gets resolved.

Can't you redact enough of one of your documents to enable it to be sent to Nisus? You might find the Redact macro useful in this regard.