Speed issue and rendering bug

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garner
Posts: 6
Joined: 2005-06-06 13:54:34

Speed issue and rendering bug

Post by garner »

I'm editing a document that's about 25,000 words and 364KB long - not huge by any means.

Unfortunately I'm finding that my two-fingered typing easily outpaces NWE's ability to keep up, and deleting characters is painfully slow.

Also, when I press return to insert a new line, the one below vanishes and only reappears if I scroll the document to 'wipe' it off the screen. If I don't do this, clicking anywhere in the document updates the line I'm clicking on, and no others. Sometimes there are thin fragments of text lines left behind.

I'm running a G5 with 10.4.1 and 1GB. Hopefully it's not my hardware struggling here, but I can't do the job with NWE running like this and I promised myself I'd never load Word again...

Any suggestions?
cgc
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Joined: 2004-09-19 13:30:46
Location: California
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Post by cgc »

A G5 with 1GB of memory shouldn't struggle with a Word Processor. What version of NWE are you using and do you have any other processes running in the background?
garner
Posts: 6
Joined: 2005-06-06 13:54:34

Post by garner »

I'm using version 2.1.3. I did have Quark, Mail and Firefox running in the background but it's exactly the same after a restart. I also used Fontbook to try to resolve any font conflicts but there's no improvement even after switching off all the duplicates.

Now that I think of it, the text was cut and pasted from Quark. Does Nisus retain any kind of hidden formatting that might slow things down?
Meuh
Posts: 16
Joined: 2003-02-18 14:18:28

Post by Meuh »

I had the problem with disappearing text when I was running one of the 2.5 alphas. Nisus's representative said it was a known bug. I thought it had been fixed in the finished releases, though.
garner
Posts: 6
Joined: 2005-06-06 13:54:34

Post by garner »

Opened the same document in Word and it's fast and flawless :(

Hopefully the next NWE build won't play up like this on my machine...
Jim Strickland
Posts: 4
Joined: 2005-05-07 08:00:25

Performance problems

Post by Jim Strickland »

I'm seeing the same performance issues with an 80,000 word novel I'm writing. It's been getting gradually worse as the novel has gotten bigger. Is there an official Nisus way to handle humungous documents like this? I've broken it into sections - 45 of them - in the hopes that NWE would be smart enough to render only the section that I'm currently working on, but it actually made everything slower. Much slower. Since these are my chapter breaks, I can't exactly take them back out.

I'm on a dual 1.8ghz G5 with a gigabyte of memory. The situation is much more painful on my 500mhz g3 ibook (640mb of RAM), using NWE 2.1.3 and Tiger.

I like NWE, and intend to buy 2.5 when it comes out, but the performance problems are a massive nuisance.
-Jim
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martin
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Post by martin »

If you are willing, please give the 2.5 beta a try. We've definitely improved typing speed (and file opening times). The disappearing text bug should also be fixed. Get the beta here:

http://www.nisus.com/Express/beta/

If you find a file that is still sluggish in 2.5, please send it to us and we'll see what we can do.
Jim Strickland
Posts: 4
Joined: 2005-05-07 08:00:25

Post by Jim Strickland »

martin wrote:If you are willing, please give the 2.5 beta a try. We've definitely improved typing speed (and file opening times). The disappearing text bug should also be fixed. Get the beta here:

http://www.nisus.com/Express/beta/

If you find a file that is still sluggish in 2.5, please send it to us and we'll see what we can do.
2.5 b3 seems to resolve the performance issues pretty well. Still a little pokey on my 500mhz g3 ibook [edit]so is everything - no quartz extreme[/edit], but it's quite nice on my dual g5. I've been using the beta on my iBook for a couple days and had no real problems with it, except for a LONG delay on both machines when you pick a palate up and drop it in the drawer.

[edit]
It also seems to resolve the crash-on-startup problem I was seeing and reporting with 2.1.3 only on my dual G5.
[/edit]
-Jim
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