Delays on "Save" command

[David Sharp]

Hi,
I'm busy discovering Nisus Writer Pro with great pleasure, after years of using MS Word. The search and replace possibilities, which I could previously use only on text documents via BBEdit, are alone worth the switch, but I'm discovering lots more advantages, such as the TOC, bookmark and index features.

However there is one minor snag which had long irritated me with Word, and which I had thought I would leave behind when switching to a new word processor. That is frequent longish pauses when saving a document.

I should add that I am a compulsive "saver" - my basic keyboard technique with practically all applications that allow it, is to hit CMD+S after every burst of keyboard activity. However much I'm told that modern computers, and notably OS X are now "crashproof", I don't see any reason to give up the habit, which has served me well (I also back up files to separate drives around every five or ten minutes).

I'm currently working on a couple of very long documents (around a million characters for one, and over 400,000 for the other) which I imported into Nisus Writer Pro from Word . As I have a lot of work in progress, and no all-new projects on the horizon, it may be a while before I create an all-new document in NWP.

I'm running Tiger on a 2.4MHz Intel-based Imac, with 3 GB of RAM.

Nevertheless, around one in every ten times when I hit the "save" command, I get a pause of several seconds, along with the spinning beachball. If anything, these occasional pauses seem even longer than they did with Word - but that may just be because I expect more of NWP!

My question is: is this behaviour normal, and if not is there anything I can do to fix it?

Given the fact that I had the same problem with Word, I appreciate that this may not be a glitch involving NWP as such.

Many thanks for any advice - David Sharp (France)

[Groucho]

Hello, David, and welcome among Nisus folks.

Maybe this can help you. I tried a 1,000,000-character document on an old G3, with Tiger. It took three to four seconds to save.

Cheers, Henry.

[martin]

File save times are tied mostly to the size and complexity of your document. Beyond that, a faster hard drive may help, but I wouldn't recommend going out and buying one. If you send us the document via the menu Help > Send Feedback we can take a look and see if there's anything to be done for future versions.

[greenmorpher]

Hiya David

Welcome to the zoo.

I would suggest saving time is heavily dependent on the amount of formatting. I just tested a 300,000 character text document saved as RTF, and it saved in a flash.

But a 50 page, 26,000 character document with a (simple) table on every page and a little formatting of the type took measurable but still very small time (the "File" in the menu bar stayed highlighted for a moment rather than just blinking).

Do you have your preferences set to autosave? I have mine set to save every 3 minutes.

Preferences > General > Autosave ... I wonder whether that would work better than your manual saves? In the Preferences, it gives you the option of autosaving to overwrite the current document or as a back-up document. I have mine set to overwrite.

In NWE (I think it was) the autosaving sometimes interfered with typing, it took so long. It doesn't any longer -- saving has been speeded up enormously. I wonder whether this is due to changes in NWP or changes in OS X?

I also wonder whether the autosave actually overwrites the previous file by saving the whole file or whether it just saves changes -- which might be much faster. Perhaps Martin could elucidate.

Whatever, give autosave a try and see what happens.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, now at the new low price of $29.95. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.

[martin]

I also wonder whether the autosave actually overwrites the previous file by saving the whole file or whether it just saves changes -- which might be much faster. Perhaps Martin could elucidate.

Currently Nisus Writer writes out the entire file each time a save is performed. Besides the technical challenges involved in saving just the parts of a file that have changed, it would also be somewhat unsafe. Consider what kind of unknown state your file might be in if the power went out in the middle of a such a piecemeal save.

[David Sharp]

Thanks for all the helpful replies.

I conclude that my problem isn't really one, and that the delays are probably linked to the length and complexity of my documents.

Concerning the "complexity" part, as a new user migrating from MS Word, I've already come to the conclusion that I will stop importing them "as is" by just telling Nisus to open the native Word doc. I'm making a clean start, by setting up my own template with my own preferred styles in the Nisus New File, and importing my Word files by creating a "New Document" each time, and leaving my unruly mess of ad hoc Word styles behind!

I'll let the forum know if I still get the spinning beachball pauses on shorter, cleaner documents: on the basis of what's been said here, I suspect that I won't.

Best wishes, David Sharp

[greenmorpher]

Martin sez:

"Consider what kind of unknown state your file might be in if the power went out in the middle of a such a piecemeal save."

True, Martin. Having had no crashes for yonks, I didn't consider the possibility! I have to admit that OS X is useful.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, now at the new low price of $29.95. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.

[mrennie]

This "application saving only changes made to the file" was actually a feature in any Microsoft Office application prior to Office 2008. It was called Fast Save, I believe, and it caused a lot of trouble. The feature was introduced at some point in the late 80s when saving files to a floppy disk became a habit with many users; the changes made to a file were simply appended to the file on the floppy disk, which allowed a faster save process on a rather slow medium. Of course, it had the potential to mess up the files quite seriously, so it was finally removed in the 2008 iteration.