Windows 10 Pro 10.0.18363
Version: 2.9.9.12 Beta (1120018) 64-bit - 25 Nov 2020
When I compile, it goes to 90-95% on the “preparing files” dialogue, then freezes. There is another popup that appears (though is hidden by the main Scrivener Window) with the text “Bad Alloc.”
This project is large and contains many photos, and I’ve worried that this is the cause of the problem. However, I get this same problem when trying to compile a small piece (10%) of the project that was created since 11/1/2020. I am able to compile another newer project that does not have photos.
This problem did not appear until the October release (11, I presume). I’ve updated to 12, hoping it would fix the issue, but the issue is still present.
My test project that I use for trying to reproduce scrivener bugs has a picture in it, and it compiled fine. What format is the picture you were using? (mIne’s a jpg.)
Upon deeper investigation, I have determined that the problem stems from the large project size (it was over 8.3 GB in size) rather than the selected compile size. Within the project, I can select to compile only a single file containing a small amount of text and no images, and I encounter the same problem. However, If I break the project into several smaller chunks, I am able to compile even the larger chunks that I was unable to when posting the previous message.
Breaking the project into chunks is a workable solution to this problem since I never intended to compile the whole thing at once. Chunking also has the nice side-effect of speeding up Scrivener load times (it could take up to 5 minutes before). However, I have resisted doing it for the following reasons:
It is hard to search for text across multiple projects
It is convenient to do a word count if everything is in one project
Neither of these are deal-breakers, though, and I will proceed with the chunked setup.
Given all this, I would make one suggestion and one feature request to the devs:
(suggestion / bug fix) fix compile so that it only looks at the files selected for the compile rather than all of them
(feature request) multi-project statistics and search capability (would be useful to anybody writing a series of books in any genre, where each book is connected but managed as a separate project)
Individual pictures compile fine, the problem is large project sizes. Large sizes are caused by many pictures, but I don’t think that the pictures themselves are the problem. If I were to guess, the operating system has run out of memory, which triggers the error. See above for a suggested fix.