Laggy scrolling

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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I’m running macOS 14.3 and Scrivener 3.3.6 on a MBP with an M1 chip, and I haven’t been able to reproduce scrolling lagging in my projects. That includes the one I have that’s over 1GB in size.

For users who are encountering lagging, these are the starting troubleshooting steps I’d recommend if this was a one-on-one help ticket:

  1. Reboot the Mac if that hasn’t happened in a while. (I know it’s basic, but it cleared up a ticket with lagging issues earlier today.)
  2. If the project is stored in a cloud-syncing service or if your Mac is automatically uploading all materials in your Desktop or Documents folder to your iCloud Drive account, try moving the project out of any cloud storage and test it again.
  3. Test a second project or the Interactive Tutorial to see if it has the same issues. The key here is if lagging happens in cloud storage but not on the hard drive, then please test the second project in both the cloud and on the local hard drive.
  4. If lagging doesn’t clear up with local storage and affects multiple projects, try resetting Scrivener’s preferences as per this Knowledge Base article.
  5. If lagging affects only one project, try resetting that specific project’s display preferences using the steps on this Knowledge Base article.
  6. If lagging continues from there, please hold down the Mac’s Option key (⌥) while clicking on Scrivener’s File menu. Then, please select the Save and Rebuild Search Indexes command to see if that will clear up the issues.
  7. If the lagging persists, please try selecting the root Manuscript or Draft folder of the project. Then, click on the Scrivenings view so all the project’s documents are selected. Please click into the text and then use the Edit > Text Tidying > Zap Gremlins command. If the project has any odd invisible characters that were introduced due to copy-and-paste or importing materials, that command could clean them out.

If the lagging issues continue after that, opening a help ticket with the emails at the bottom of the contact page is likely the best move.

If you do need to open a help ticket, please include a link to this post and let our team know that you’ve worked through these steps and what the results were for each of these troubleshooting steps.

That will help us avoid asking you to test items that you’ve already used.

Since there are many things that could cause lagging, knowing the troubleshooting steps a user has already tried can be helpful.

It’s also helpful to know where the lagging project is stored, if it has a lot of styles or media files, and if any custom fonts are used.

If we start seeing trends in the help tickets, that can help us narrow down possible causes and do additional testing in-house.

I’d really love to find a common thread that can be addressed.

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