Why is NWP so painfully slow?

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germandanny
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Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by germandanny »

I cannot figure out why my NWP 1.4 is so slow, and if anyone could help me figure this out, I'd really appreciate it. I write in Scrivener and then import to NWP to format the document (at least I'd like to, I use Mellel currently because I can't get NWP to work, but I like it's features a lot more). It opens just fine but as soon as I try to make a change in the document (by this point it's pretty large with lots of footnotes, etc.) I get the little beachball of death. Every time, NWP hangs until I force quit. Is there a secret memory cache I can increase or something? Any tips? Like I said above, I'd love to use NWP over Mellel because of all the great features, but I can't seem to get it to not hang when I use it. Any other dissertation or book writers with similar experiences or am I alone in this? Thanks

Dan
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martin
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by martin »

Hi Dan- sorry you've had problems. Would you mind sharing your file with us? We can check if there's something peculiar to your machine or the file causing the slowness. The best would be for you to send us the file using the menu Help > Send Feedback, as it will automatically collect a profile of your machine for us. Thanks.
germandanny
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by germandanny »

Well... sending someone I don't know my dissertation (the object of lots of time, effort and my wife's money over the last three years) really freaks me out. But I suppose I'll comply, as having this figured out would be great. Thanks for your quick response.
Dan
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martin
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by martin »

Thank you for entrusting your file to us Dan. I can certainly understand your trepidation in sending your great work to a stranger! I've taken a look at the problem and have made sure to delete and destroy your email and file.

As to the slowness, it doesn't look good. There's something about the copious footnotes in your file, and density thereof, that greatly slows NWP down when editing in Page View. Switching to Draft View makes editing quite smooth, but I can understand that might not be acceptable for your needs. For now all I can do is say that I'm putting together a dummy document that reproduces the slowness found in your document, and will file the issue for us to look at. Sorry we can't be of more help.
goldste4
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by goldste4 »

Hello Martin or Dan (or anyone else), as an academic who is thinking about switching to NWP, could you give us a sense of how big the document needs to be (and/or how many footnotes there needs to be) before things start to noticeably slow down? This is certainly a concern that I would have too.
Thanks.
Josh
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Elbrecht
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Elbrecht »

Hi Dan & Josh -

what (1) OS version are you running on what (2) machines with what (3) RAM installed - all CPU for Nisus only?

I wonder...
HE
MacBook Pro i5
SSD 840/850 Pro
High Sierra 10.13.6
Nisus Writer Pro 3.4
germandanny
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by germandanny »

I'm running a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, Mac OSX 10.6.2 and NWP 1.4.

I don't think it was my system. I've sent the file to Martin and he said it's something else, possibly related to my addiction to footnotes. My dissertation is around 60,000 words at this point with around another 40,000 words of footnotes.
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martin
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by martin »

germandanny wrote:I don't think it was my system. I've sent the file to Martin and he said it's something else, possibly related to my addiction to footnotes. My dissertation is around 60,000 words at this point with around another 40,000 words of footnotes.
Dan is right, his system isn't the problem, it's really the sheer amount of footnotes that causing the slowness in Page View. More specifically, it seems to be the density of footnotes; Dan has many per page, and some that involve trickier layout situations (eg: footnotes that span multiple pages or require forcing the line of text to which they are attached to the next page). This is what slows NWP down, and is something we can hopefully work on improving.
goldste4 wrote:Hello Martin or Dan (or anyone else), as an academic who is thinking about switching to NWP, could you give us a sense of how big the document needs to be (and/or how many footnotes there needs to be) before things start to noticeably slow down?
Hi Josh- the problem has to do with the number of footnotes and how dense they are in the file. When I say "dense" I mean how many footnotes occur per page, and how tricky they are to layout. As I mentioned above, Dan's paper seemed quite dense. If I remember correctly, he had at least 1000 footnotes, and often a lot per page. Also, from Dan's word count, you can also see he has 40% of his document's text in footnotes! That doesn't help with the speed.
goldste4
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by goldste4 »

Thanks for the quick replies; very helpful to know. Josh
Timotheus
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Timotheus »

This is exactly my problem. I too have lengthy documents with tons of footnotes, which in NWP simply become too slow to work with. So for the moment I'm using Mellel, which doesn't have this problem.

But I sincerely do hope that in the next version of NWP (1.5, or whatever number it will bear) this problem will be solved.
Anne Cuneo
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Anne Cuneo »

Wouldn't the simple solution here be to split the document in two?
I work with huge single files, and I love Nisus because it's quick and sure.
As I have few notes, I don't have to split it, but it's what I should do, I think, if I had a document as gigantic as germandaddy!
These were my 5 cents of non-technical advice...
Anne
Groucho
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Groucho »

This is odd. I have a few documents of roughly 160 to 300 pages that open in page view in no more than three seconds. In one case at least the typesetting bar doesn’t even appear. The documents are pretty simple (fiction), same template, no footnotes, no images, no tables, headers with title and page numbers. Other documents with about the same, or even smaller, size, no footnotes etc., open in no less than ten seconds, more often in twenty. I am kind of sure this was not so with Leopard. This change occurred with Snow Leopard.

And… for Anne Cuneo.

There are two macros, I don’t know if they come with a standard installation, that let you to split and join files. You can find them here, http://nisus.com/pro/macros/?activeCat=Document

Greetings, Henry.
ptram
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by ptram »

One of the things that could be added to Nisus, sooner or later, is a "Book" or "Master" document, that lets manage several documents as separate chapters, with consecutive page numbering and indexes. Maybe this could be done via the Doc Manager, or a dedicate document type.

Paolo
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by rmark »

Paolo writes:
One of the things that could be added to Nisus, sooner or later, is a "Book" or "Master" document, that lets [the user] manage several documents as separate chapters, with consecutive page numbering and indexes.
This is an interesting thought that arises periodically. We can look into the possibility.
Write On!
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talazem
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by talazem »

Hello. I'm wondering if there has been any progress on this issue of NWP becoming sluggish with academic papers heavy on footnotes? I recently came to NWP, and I have a chapter of my dissertation that I am currently writing in it. However, this chapter is only 14 pages so far, already has 140 footnotes (a large part of it is a critical edition of an Arabic text), and as such is already running very, very slow. At times, it takes 10-20 seconds for the screen to catch up with the four or five letters I've already typed. Obviously, this does not make for a pleasant typing and editing experience (especially when doing a critical edition, which at times can be frustrating enough).

I'm tempted to go back to XeLaTeX (which can do anything, but with lots of time spent on fiddling). Using Nisus was a revelation as to not fiddling anymore -- I simply set up a number of character and paragraph styles, applied them consistently, and I was off editing my text! But with this huge snag of sluggishness, I am being reminded why I left word processors (namely, Ms Word) back in the day and moved to LaTeX.

Anyhow: I'm not trying to carp, since I don't fancy converting this document to LaTeX (it will take a day or more), so I'm praying there's some hope on the (near) horizon for answers to these speed and processing issues. (I'm using an MBP 15" i5 with 8gb ram, so the machine is definitely not the culprit). Many thanks for your time.
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