If I switch to split windows in Scrivenings View my ~150.000 word document (just text, no page breaks displayed), Scrivener freezes. It works fine if I switch to something other than Scrivenings View before I call up the split, but that’s a bit annoying. It also happens with preset layouts (which I have had to set to open in Corkwall view in order to work), and it’s not the point of presets to have them not look the way you actually want them to look
It happens even if Scrivener is the only program open on my machine (Yosemite), so I doesn’t appear to have to do with my machine’s RAM per se.
Is there something I can do about this, outside of the workaround I already figured out?
Clunky layout switches. Yeah, so, even with Corkwall View, if I switch from ‘single editor, no binder’ to a preset layout with a vertical split and the binder, Scrivener juggles windows first, going to horizontal split, then to the vertical split, taking a long time to do so. This is a bit scary, I have to say, watching Scrivener slowly churn out the layout I actually want, going through convulsions all the way there…
Anything I can do about that? Is it connected to my other problem?
There will be a little visual clutter happening while layouts are being switched. There isn’t much of a way around that, given how it is implemented. It has to add or remove frames and scale them somehow, and the only way to do that is in front of you.
It shouldn’t however be something you are waiting for, unless you have hit a specific case, probably content related, that causes a long period of recalculation to build one of the views. Scrivenings mode can be slow like that—especially if you’re loading more than 100k words at once, but it should actually freeze, rather you can click away at any time to cancel building the Scrivenings session. Huge corkboards (in terms of quantity of cards, and I’m talking over around a thousand cards) are another thing that can be slow. Sorted columns in the outliner can also be slow, especially if you have more than a few hundred items being sorted.
A good way to check for anything like that would be to create a simple blank test project somewhere temporary and apply your various presets one after the other.
Okay, this is odd. I sat down to see if Scrivener would unfreeze if I just waited long enough, and eventually it did (felt like five minutes but could have been much less). And now switching from one to two editors in scrivenings view works basically instantly, even after closing Scrivener.
I guess there just needed to happen some caching or something? However, it works now to the liking of impatient me, so I’d consider this support request successfully closed
Hi, so, it keeps happening, with a 160k words document.
For some reason the switch happens quickly when I have the view set to ‘Overview’, and there seems to be some caching going on since it’s only if I haven’t used split-view for a while that the switch is happening so slowly.
Right now Scrivener is beachballing, using up 94 to 100% of CPU and has the red (doesn’t react) notification. Dunno how it is that other apps still work under those circumstances, but who am I to questions numbers. I can’t click anywhere in Scriv to stop the change in layout, altough it seems to register the clicks because once it catches itself it jumps to the document I clicked on while it was beachballing.
I sent an error report after I last force-quit Scrivener. I don’t know if this’ll be any use.
Do you need any further info?
EDIT: This same thing also happens when I’m in split view and want to open that inlay thingy with the footnotes and snapshots etc.
Could you clarify what you mean by the “Overview” feature? What is the menu command you are using. Do you mean Scrivenings view mode? If so, that’s one of the things I mentioned that can make things a bit slow. The program really isn’t designed to be running with 160,000 words of text in one of the main editors at all times. Since the design focus of the software is on small chunks of text rather than book-sized, we haven’t put a lot of priority into optimising for massive files. It’s a pretty difficult problem in general anyway, even many programs that devote their entire development to the single-document model, like Word, struggle once you put that many words into it.
Sorry, I’m using a German language version and I’m not 100% sure about the English terms.
With overview I mean cmd+3.
Problems arise with cmd+1.
You’re suggesting I split my book into multiple projects?
EDIT: I remember using Word on a Windows XP-Machine; the book was 100 pages shorter then, and I still had to split it into 10 parts in order to keep Word from taking more than a split-second to save… (I save manually every few seconds, it’s an automatism I tought myself) Ah, the olden days… not so good after all )))
Okay yes, got it. Cmd–3 is what we call the Outliner.
I’m not suggesting splitting the project, what I was referring to was specific to only one condition: having lots of words in a single text editor window. The program isn’t really designed to work with your entire book all at once like that—at least that is how I understand you’ve been using it. My suggestion, if you are doing that, viewing the whole book at once in Cmd–1 mode, then try not doing that for a while and see if things speed up. You can still use the sidebar on the left to jump around in your text from point to point.
At any rate, in all of these cases most of the slowdown comes from scale. If you have 8,543 index cards in a corkboard and ask the software to redesign the window, it has to calculate for all of those 9k cards. If you have three cards in the window, you should have no lag at all in changing the window size. If you have an 800 word chunk of text in the editor, it should be fast. If you have 160,000 words in the editor then it’s going to have to wrap all of those lines again and that takes time.
Ah, okay, it’s about only having Scrivener display a certain chunk of my book. I see.
I guess then it’s easier to use preset layouts instead of switching by clicking the split-screen button. I have a split-screen preset where the new window is in Outliner view. I’ll just have to set up a shortcut for it and learn to use it, I guess.
