Why is NWP so painfully slow?

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goldste4
Posts: 98
Joined: 2010-02-22 15:06:48

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by goldste4 »

Hello Talazem,

This is a miser-loves-company post. I've recently switched to NWP too, used mainly for academic writing. I've found the same slow down, even in small documents (about 7000 words in the body with 90 footnotes (about 2000 words)). But, for me, the slow down tends to come and go when I'm typing (usually editing within the document rather than typing at the end of it), lasting for part of a line or so and then the usual speed returns. Although others will surely know better, I'm guessing that the slow down comes when the text I'm typing forces NWP to calculate whether footnotes are going to fall on one page or the next. I realize that I can switch to draft or full screen view and avoid this problem, but I've used much larger documents (300 pages with probably 1000 footnotes) in Wordperfect with a much slower computer without any difficulties. I really like NWP, but it is a very annoying problem that simply shouldn't exist on a modern machine in a modern word processor.

Josh
Timotheus
Posts: 68
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Timotheus »

About this issue, some time ago I sent a personal message to the Nisus developing team. The answer was not very encouraging: "It's on our list".

At this stage, the major problem seems to be not how to solve this problem. This is a merely technical issue, for which somehow some solution should exist.

The major problem is, first and for all, how to convince the Nisus developing team of the urgency of this matter. This deficiency alone, indeed, suffices to make Nisus unfit for (at least some kinds of) academic writing. In my opinion, its solution is more desirable than any new feature whatever.
MBP
Posts: 27
Joined: 2009-09-25 14:21:53

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by MBP »

I too have been hoping....I was forced to leave Nisus and reformat all of my files to another format. This has been a major disappointment! Sorry to say. Seems like they do not really care from your posts! That is a shame!
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martin
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by martin »

MBP wrote:Seems like they do not really care from your posts! That is a shame!
It's not that we don't care, it's just that all features and improvements take time. For moderate footnote usage, I think NWP works just great. It's only in some of the more taxing situations that NWP bogs down while typing. I don't want to try and sweep the issue away- I know it's frustrating for academic users who make very heavy use of footnotes and it's upsetting for me to hear that some users have had to switch. We've made improvements to our handling of footnotes in the past, and I hope we'll have more improvements in the future.
talazem
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Joined: 2010-06-16 17:02:50

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by talazem »

Hello Martin,

Thanks for your reply. I look forward to when things improve. Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm having to retypeset everything in LaTeX as a result of this problem (I need line numbering, which only your software and LaTeX does), which has taken me days. Colleagues and friends have been asking me about Nisus, and while initially I was happy with it (for example, I like how you all do styles), this slow-down with academic writing is -- for academics, of course -- a deal-breaker.

I will remain subscribed to this thread, with the hope of hearing good news in the future about this issue.

Kind regards.
Kino
Posts: 400
Joined: 2008-05-17 04:02:32

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Kino »

talazem wrote:Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm having to retypeset everything in LaTeX as a result of this problem (I need line numbering, which only your software and LaTeX does), which has taken me days.
It may be too late but, AFAIK, the easiest way to convert a NW document into LaTeX format (not XeTeX) would be to export it in OpenOffice XML format from NWP and use Writer2LaTeX (OpenOffice plug-in) to export the exported odt file as a LaTeX source file.
http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net/index.html

The main problem with Writer2LaTeX filter — for me — is that it tries to reproduce the original formatting too exactly, so that final PDFs generated from its LaTeX source files look rather ugly. But I tested it years ago, perhaps the current version might be more clever.

So I decided to convert NW documents into LaTeX manually and wrote some macros for making easier such conversion.

· Macro for converting footnotes and endnotes into in-line notes with LaTeX tags.
http://www2.odn.ne.jp/alt-quinon/files/ ... dy_nwm.zip

· And a macro for adding \textit{ . . . }, \textbf{ . . . } and \ textsc{ . . . } to text in Italic, Bold and Small Caps styles:

Code: Select all

 ### Styles2LaTeX ###

# Mixed style attributes, e.g. "Bold Italic", "Bold and SmallCaps", are not supported.

$tagFont = 'Courier'
$tagSize = 9
$tagColor = Color.newWithHexTriplet 0x009933

$tags = $prop = $vals = Hash.new
$styles = Array.new ('it', 'bf', 'sc')
$tags{'it'} = '\textit{'
$prop{'it'} = 'italic'
$vals{'it'} = true
$tags{'bf'} = '\textbf{'
$prop{'bf'} = 'bold'
$vals{'bf'} = true
$tags{'sc'} = '\textsc{'
$prop{'sc'} = 'characterCase'
$vals{'sc'} = 3
$tags{'it.closing'} = $tags{'bf.closing'} = $tags{'sc.closing'} = '}'

Require Pro Version 1.3
$doc = Document.active
if $doc == undefined
	exit
end

foreach $key, $value in $tags
	$value = Cast to String $value
	Push Target Text $value
		Set Font Name $tagFont
		Set Font Size $tagSize
		Set Text Color $tagColor
	Pop Target Text
	$tags.setValueForKey $value, $key
end

$sels = Hash.new

$text = $doc.text
$i = 0
while $i < $text.length
	$attr = $text.displayAttributesAtIndex $i
	$range = $text.rangeOfDisplayAttributesAtIndex $i
	foreach $style in $styles
		if $attr.getProperty($prop{$style}) == $vals{$style}
			if $sels{$style} == undefined
				$sels{$style} = Array.new
			end
			$sel = TextSelection.new $text, $range
			$sels{$style}.appendValue $sel
		end
	end
	$i = $range.bound
end

foreach $key in $sels.keys
	foreach $i, $sel in reversed $sels{$key}
		if ! $i
			break
		elsif $sels{$key}[$i-1].text.isSameObject($sel.text)
			if $sels{$key}[$i-1].bound == $sel.location
				$sels{$key}[$i-1].length += $sel.length
				$sels{$key}.removeValueAtIndex $i
			end
		end
	end
end

$selToStyle = Hash.new
foreach $key in $sels.keys
	if $sels{$key}.count
		foreach $sel in $sels{$key}
			$selToStyle{$sel} = $key
		end
	end
end

$allSels = $selToStyle.keys
$allSels.sort

foreach $sel in reversed $allSels
	$style = $selToStyle{$sel}
	$sel.text.insertAtIndex $sel.bound, $tags{"$style.closing"}
	$sel.text.insertAtIndex $sel.location, $tags{$style}
end

### end of macro ###
As my documents are not so densely footnoted, I’m not suffering from your problem. I use LaTeX to typeset some of my documents because there is no word processor which could produce a decent output for Japanese documents (and I blame Apple, not Nisus Software) and InDesign is overkilling for me. To edit LaTeX sources, I’m using NWP whose powerful and flexible macro language is MUCH more helpful for me than, for example, the syntax colouring feature available in some other applications, e.g. TeXShop and TextWrangler.
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Hamid
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Hamid »

Many thanks, Kino, for these macros. They come at a time when I am looking into LaTeX and XeTeX.
The Macro for converting footnotes and endnotes into in-line notes with LaTeX tags gives some errors like:
Default Note Text for note 1015 (footnotes) could not be removed.
I don't know if this is significant.
Is there any way to get justification correct in Arabic, for example the last line of a paragraph?
Also, is there support for more than one footnote per line?
Kino
Posts: 400
Joined: 2008-05-17 04:02:32

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Kino »

Hamid wrote:Default Note Text for note 1015 (footnotes) could not be removed.
You get such a warning for a footnote whose Default Note Text is different from the one defined in the Stylesheet. For example, if the latter is ‘.<tab>’, the macro fails to remove ‘<tab>’ from a footnote such as ‘4<tab>blah blah blah . . .’. To locate the 1015th (?!) ‘\footnote{’, you can use this macro.

Code: Select all

$i = 1015
Select Document Start
while $i
	Find '\x5Cfootnote{', 'E'  # \x5C stands for backslash
	$i -= 1
end
Is there any way to get justification correct in Arabic, for example the last line of a paragraph?
Also, is there support for more than one footnote per line?
In LaTeX/XeTeX? I don’t know but you may find appropriate packages (at least that for multiple notes per line) at
http://sunsite.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/tex/c ... #footnotes
http://sunsite.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/tex/c ... paragraphs

Note that not all packages are compatible with Arabic script.
Kino
Posts: 400
Joined: 2008-05-17 04:02:32

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Kino »

The macro above may be too slow for the 1015th footnote. Try this one instead.

Code: Select all

$i = 1015
$doc = Document.active
$sels = $doc.text.findAll '\x5Cfootnote{', 'E'
if $i > $sels.count
	exit 'This document does not have so many footnotes, exiting...'
end
$doc.setSelection $sels[$i-1]
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Hamid
Posts: 777
Joined: 2007-01-17 03:25:42

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Hamid »

Thank you for the explanation and the precious links.

Edit: And thank you for the faster macro.
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Jester
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Location: Midway through infinity (or Ottawa, Canada).

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Jester »

MBP wrote:I too have been hoping....I was forced to leave Nisus and reformat all of my files to another format. This has been a major disappointment! Sorry to say. Seems like they do not really care from your posts! That is a shame!
Preposterous!!!

Nisus is the one forum I've seen in which there actually is a person of the company looking at the posts.

If they reply "thank you", it's a lot more than what most companies do.

But, back on topic.

I recently finished my thesis/project, and I did notice several slow-downs. It's a 90 page document, i.e. 9040 words (good job, me). This happened in a 1GHz Mac, I don't know if that affected the programme's performance.

Cheers.
goldste4
Posts: 98
Joined: 2010-02-22 15:06:48

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow? *Bump*

Post by goldste4 »

Hi All,
I hate to bump a thread, but as much as I really like NPW2 I've just been struggling with its (periodic) unbearable slowness when it comes to editing documents with footnotes (i.e., going back into the document from the beginning to rewrite, add and delete text). Nothing different to report than others have before—at certainly places on the page, after each character NWP2 (or OS X's text engine?) does some calculation, redraws the screen, and everything slows down so much so (although this was the worst I've experienced) that I've gotten probably a good 100+ characters ahead of it typing: just sit back and wait for each letter to appear one by one, sometimes a second apart. When I'm just writing (i.e., always at the bottom of the document), I don't really notice much of a problem, but the editing is periodically killing me.
Fyi, the document was about 15,000 words with about 150 footnotes (most about 1 or 2 lines long) and no images, but I've recently split it into two ~8K word documents to try to speed things up without too much success.
No other purpose than to vent. NWP2 is great, I really like using it for my professional writing, but sometimes it is nearly unusable.
Josh
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martin
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Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow? *Bump*

Post by martin »

Hi Josh,
goldste4 wrote:Fyi, the document was about 15,000 words with about 150 footnotes (most about 1 or 2 lines long) and no images, but I've recently split it into two ~8K word documents to try to speed things up without too much success.
That sounds like a very sparse number/length of footnotes, and I wouldn't expect that to tax NWP. Would you be able to send us your document so we can take a look? Thanks, and sorry for the frustration you've experienced.
goldste4
Posts: 98
Joined: 2010-02-22 15:06:48

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by goldste4 »

Hi Martin,
I've sent the file onwards. Thanks again for prompt attention. The customer (and user!) support for NWP is fantastic.
Thanks,
Josh
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Jester
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Location: Midway through infinity (or Ottawa, Canada).

Re: Why is NWP so painfully slow?

Post by Jester »

I'm happy to say that I'll start my Translation Studies PhD at University of Ottawa, and it'll be great to give you feedback on how Nisus will handle the large document(s).
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