Cook a meal while Scrivener is loading

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

99.9% of the time I use Scrivener in Scrivenings View with the whole project selected (it’s only text, no images, no tables, nothing). Now when I open Scrivener, I can sit there for quite some time watching it count down project pages until it finally reaches the end, moves the cursor to the page I was on when I switched off last time and allows me to start working.
This is very annoying. I know I could speed things up by working inside a single folder/chapter or even just a single document/scene, but it makes me cramp up when there’s nothing above or below the piece of text I’m working on and I can’t scroll around like I need it for my ususal workflow, it makes me feel locked in and detached from the rest of my text. I can’t work like this.
(I also wish I could use the binder for navigation only when using Scrivenings View, so that it doesn’t lock you into a single document just because you needed to look something up and didn’t feel like going the whole one hundred Menu > View > Go to… > Folder > Document yards or don’t like Redaction Mode)

Is there another way to make Scrivener not have to go through all the pages while creating the Scrivenings View of a longer document? This and the (for me) suboptimal binder functionality are the only thing standing between you and my 45$.

2

I get $45 if I help you solve your problem? SWEEET! :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, I’m just a by-stander, but I wanted to let you know that this isn’t typical performance on a Mac. I once decided to test Scrivener’s robustness by importing the King James bible and splitting it up by book and chapter. So I dug that monstrosity of a project up and did some quick tests.

Loading the whole shebang in scrivenings mode took about 5 seconds. I then locked the editor so I could click on a random “book” and chapter document. I jumped to John, chap 10. I then closed the project, and re-opened it. This time, from clicking on Scrivener to being able to move the cursor around in chapter 10 took about ten seconds. Total words loaded to the editor: 794,895.

Relevant computer specs: MB Air 2 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB of Ram. Activity monitor says that Scrivener takes 63.9 MB without any projects open, 89.1MB with one chapter loaded into the editor, and 97.1 MB when my test project is open and loaded into Scrivenings mode.

So, your experience with text-only documents isn’t representative. But what might be the cause of your situation? Here are my initial guesses:

Too little RAM; if you don’t have a lot of free memory in which to stuff all of Scrivener + your document, maybe your computer is having to struggle to make room?

Maybe a corrupted search index? I have no idea if search indexes are even a problem here, but I know how to “fix” them if they’re broken… Hold down the OPTion key while you click on File->Save and Rebuild Search Indexes. Maybe that’ll help? It won’t hurt.

And that’s all I’ve got on the performance issue; good luck!

As for navigating, I’m not sure what you want and are trying, but I used the Editor->Lock In Place function to keep the scrivenings mode from being undone by a click in the binder. I can click on any part of my project that is loaded into the editor to quickly navigate there. And if I needed to look at anything else, I could split the editor and load other documents there instead.

3

As Robert says, to navigate while in Scrivenings mode, simply lock the editor in place (Opt-Cmd-L). When you do that, clicks in the binder won’t change what’s viewed in the editor, but clicking on a document in the binder that is present in the Scrivenings session will scroll to that section. (A future version will feature a quick navigation popover, too.)

As for performance, how long is your manuscript? Performance should generally be good when laying out text, although it will be a little slower in page layout mode. The performance there is mainly dependant on Apple’s pages and layout code. But if you load a long document in Word, you’ll notice that can also take a while to lay out pages in a long document. Scrivener is already very well optimised in that regard, so I’m surprised it’s causing you issues.

All the best,
Keith

4

Welllll… :smiley:

Omg, this is exactly what I needed! I think I even remember seeing this in the tutorial? Wtf?!

It’s ~144.500 words, and you’re right, layout mode was the problem (although I timed it and ‘a little’ slower meant more than a whole minute to show 382 pages). Without it, things happen basically instantaneously.

I also found where to set fixed width in the editor and all, so now I’m basically very happy with this app and want to throw my dollars at you. Better duck, I only got coins on me :smiley:

Thank you for your help, both of you, and thanks to all the Scrivener devs for writing this great, affordable app!! :slight_smile:

5

= this guy KBbot.png
(Plus another couple for Windows.) :slight_smile:

6

That is quite a long time. I just tried pasting in 315,000 words into page view, resulting in 571 pages, and that took 21 seconds to lay out. 150,000 words, resulting in 280 pages, took under ten seconds. By comparison, when I pasted the same 315,000 words into Pages, it seemed only to take 5 seconds to lay out. However, as soon as I tried to type, I got the spinning beach ball - it was another 25 seconds before I could type anything. So Pages seems to be laying out what is visible but then laying out everything else in the background, so it seemed to lay out faster but actually took longer, at 30 seconds. Word was much faster, taking only a few seconds. TextEdit took 21 seconds, exactly the same as Scrivener, which is to be expected as they use the same text engine. So while it would definitely be nice to have it as fast as Word, I don’t think there’s much I can do to optimise it further, unfortunately, since I’m relying on Apple’s text engine and TextEdit (and Pages, though less obviously) have the same speeds.

I’m glad everything else is working well for you, though!

All the best,
Keith

7

Then thanks to KB! <3

There also seems to be a difference between pasting and having it compile the Scrivenings View (w/ pages) from dozens of individual documents. Pasting my whole novel into a new singe-document Project (w/pages) took only ~20 seconds, and opening that single document project took ~20 seconds, too.

No, it’s all pretty much perfect. The only reason I used pages view was because I hadn’t found the setting for the width of the text area.

Currently I’m very much enjoying how orderly all my various writing projects become once I feed the contents of my Finder folders into a Scrivener Project. It’s magic!

8

Huh, I figured this one for a Wish List item. +1 from me on that thought.

-gr

9

Junk food … or cordon bleu?