cursor possible bug

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi,
when operating scrivener my cursor is very glitchy. There are times when I try to move it and it’s slow to take – I see the spinning color time wheel. In general it does not work smoothly. I have pictures inserted here and there throughout my text. Could this be causing the problem? If not or if so, how can I fix it.

Thanks so much. I love your software.
AEW

2

Pictures are indeed one of the main culprits in introducing lag in the text editor. You can put a fair amount into a single file, but the more you add (and by that I mean sheer bytes rather than quantity—one massive picture can be as much a burden as a hundred tiny ones) the more data Scrivener has to work with and save periodically.

I prefer to use linked images for everything—you get the thumbnail in the editor so there is little downside in doing so, but instead of the whole graphic being stored in the text itself, all that gets stored is a short text-based pointer to the original file.

In Scrivener 3 there are now two ways to do so, documented in §15.6.4 of the user manual, starting on page 414. It first goes over basic links to the file system, but the new method is covered in Images Linked to Binder Items, pg. 416. With the latter you get the benefit of not having to worry about where the images are stored on the disk, Scrivener manages that for you. You can even set it up to automatically link to binder images on drag and drop, in the Behaviors: Dragging & Dropping preference pane.

I’d test the theory on one document that is notably slow at the moment. For each image:

  1. Drag the image from the editor to your binder somewhere. This will import the image as a file into the binder.
  2. Delete the original in the editor.
  3. Use Insert ▸ Image Linked to Document to place it—or if you’ve set the preference, merely drag it from the binder back into the editor.

To ensure it worked, double-click on the image, and in the lower half of the edit image palette you’ll see a binder reference with a button to jump to the image.

Once you have the document converted, I’d restart Scrivener to give it a clean slate and see if the document with linked images now performs at an acceptable rate.