I’m working on edits to a novel, with one pane showing the current manuscript, the second pane showing the imported Word file received from my editor, and the inspector showing the editor’s comments. I’m finding that about half the time I click on a comment to jump to that place in the manuscript (or to delete the comment), there’s a lag of a couple of seconds before Scrivener responds. The manuscript is about 100,000 words with less than a hundred comments, so it’s not an absurd size, plus I have a powerful computer and I don’t get this lag browsing the same document in LibreOffice -– it’s clearly a bottleneck within Scrivener. It’s annoying enough that I’m probably just going to resort to keeping Scrivener and LibreOffice open side by side instead, but that kind of defeats the point of using Scrivener at all.
What’s your overall project sized in MB? Hover your mouse pointer over the SCRIV folder for your project and it will give you a reading after a second or so.
Also, does your project include pictures in the manuscript? That’s generally a culprit for laggy responses.
Otherwise, clicking on Manuscript/Draft and selecting Comments in the Inspector and clicking on each comment should take you to successive comments throughout the project in nanoseconds.
If I’m understanding you, yeah, this is exactly what I’m doing -– that’s what’s periodically causing the lag. The project is 39MB and it has some pictures in other folders but nothing but text in any of the documents that I have open when the lag is happening.
Hi. Yes, that lag does occur when a single document contains many comments (over 50) and the “Inspector” panel is open. I don’t know the reason, but it’s been mentioned before. It only happens in the Windows version (not on macOS) and isn’t related to the document’s length, but rather to the comment loading process. If you close the “Inspector” panel, you’ll see that the document loads much faster.
In any case, I recommend splitting your manuscript into multiple documents (if you haven’t already). That’s where Scrivener’s true strength and power lie.
Regards!
Yeah, during the writing process I do split up my manuscript to avoid lag, but when I receive edits back from an editor it’s just one Word document. (Honestly I’m also not thrilled about the fact that I have to split the manuscript in the first place -– this is software aimed at novelists that can’t actually handle an entire novel. MacOS Scrivener may have its foibles but the Windows version is rickety to the point that I would stop using it if there was a decent alternative.)
Question did you divide the word document to match your scrivener structure or are you viewing it as one document? What happens if split it to match at least your chapter structure, which should reduce the comments you are reviewing at any one time. I have a 100,000 word novel in Scrivener and did a Scrivenings view of the manuscript will well over 50 comments and no lag. Is the lag in the scrivener half or the side of the word document?
Hmm, it hadn’t occurred to me to try that -– thanks, I’ll see if it helps.
This is software designed around the idea that it’s easier to approach a long work in chunks, rather than by dealing with the whole thing at once.
Out of curiosity, and for clarity on advice to others, is that a single document of 100 000 words?
Some may feel it’s easier to work in chunks, but personally I don’t. And I wish Scrivener allowed me to choose!
You can choose… you can have your whole manuscript in one binder document. But that is to work against the way Scrivener is designed and so you can expect hindrances, the lag when you have hundreds of comments being one.
To set the record straight, re @Adrlopgal’s comment above:
It does happen on the Mac too if you are running a Scrivenings session on a large number of documents resulting a large number of Inspector Comments. It’s different on a Mac as the Binder documents are stitched together, rather than remaining a tiled sequence of documents as on Windows.
Converting the Inspector Comments to Inline Annotations would alleviate the lag, I believe, but they would be more visually intrusive.
So, you do have a choice of how to handle it within Scrivener; or you can choose to revert to Word/LibreOffice.
You make it sound like the lag with large documents is the unavoidable price of allowing people to work with binders etc. But I’m pretty sure there could be a version of Scrivener that has all the same functionality without the lag. It’s just that the developers don’t want to invest in implementing that, because (as you say) it’s not the design philosophy, plus the Windows version in particular has never been a priority for them. For me, it’s unfortunate.
Just tried this, but the problem is, I then lose the list of comments in the Inspector, which I need both to keep track of what work I have left and to navigate from comment to comment. Unless there’s a way around that.
Your approach is your approach, but insisting on a single long document eliminates most of the reasons to use Scrivener in the first place.
I still find the binder, combined with the multi-pane view, absolutely invaluable for browsing dozens of research and notes files, it’s just the manuscript itself that I want in one long document. Like many people, 90% of Scrivener’s functions are irrelevant to me, but I’ve grown so reliant on that remaining 10% that I have no choice but to use it.
Aside from the app’s performance, working with smaller pieces (like chapters) helps writers’ productivity. It’s empirically proven. I encourage you to try it.
Regards.
I have tried it. In fact, I have written, edited and published a novel that I wrote this way. I didn’t find that it helped my productivity -– on the contrary -– so I went back. (Though I think it’s important to distinguish between structuring a work of fiction in chapters and separating a manuscript into Scrivener sub-documents -– the former I continue to do, it’s only the latter I don’t like.)
You’re shooting yourself in the foot. Scrivener cannot handle an extensive manuscript on one document. I’ve seen someone report a lag with just 6 000 words in a document.
Personally, I’ve never experienced annoying lag below 50,000 words (20.000 on a very low-end computer). In this case, as I pointed out above, in my tests with the version of Scrivener 3 for Windows I did notice some time ago that if a user enters many comments in a document, even if it is 1000 words, there is a noticeable lag when loading the Inspector menu. If the Inspector is closed, that lag does not appear.
Regards!
Well, in practice, as a grudging concession to Scrivener’s functionality issues, I divided my most recent 100,000-word book into three documents, and at that size I didn’t get any lag. But I do want to reiterate, if you’re working with an editor, you are going to be receiving Word files containing the unbroken manuscript -– in a program aimed at professional writers, it’s really not great that you can’t effectively work with those files unless you go to the trouble of dividing them up every time you import them.
I’d call that a minor inconvenience, a hashtag in two place when importing, less than a minute of a user’s time.