Hello,
Apologies if this has been answered before: I only managed to find posts on similar but not quite identical issues.
I’ve been having an issue w my main scrivener project file for the past couple of days (had occasional app crashes & some typing lag for some months but thought nothing of it…). Yesterday when I opened the file I v. briefly got a ‘rebuilding search indexes’ dialog then just the spinning wheel, no project window, for ~90min, after which it seemed to work okay though I didn’t try working in it at that time. I saved it with a different file name but had same issue with the new version. Both these versions were approx 124MB & included mainly text with ≤10 pdf files in research folder, which I thought should be OK based on what others have said here.
Today I copied & pasted the draft & some research notes text from the copy (leaving behind all pdfs) to a completely new project file (now only 2MB), which seemed to solve the problem on opening but about 1hr ago I just tried to switch page layout views & it stayed hanging for the 90min again… No dialog this time.
After that I restored to an older version (from 2 days ago) that didn’t spend the long hang time on opening, and the new copy/paste one seems to be running ok now too, but any advice on why this might be happening/how I might avoid in future would be appreciated, since project is my phd thesis which is due in a couple of months so this delay has been a bit stressful!
BTW I didn’t have any issues with other project files, and this was the same on two different machines – I sync via Dropbox.
My guess would be that an image or PDF you imported recently had some problems with it, and now the project is struggling with it whenever it has to encounter it. Either of those scenarios would impact the search index routine, as it scours PDFs for searchable text as well. It is interesting that it eventually did work after taking so long—usually the program just flat out crashes if bad PDF comes along (unfortunately there isn’t much we can do about that aspect as the PDF reader and how it can run inside of another program is a Mac feature available to developers).
So the step you took to remove the PDFs from the equation seemed partially successful. The next thing to check for are figures in the text itself. It should be pretty easy to locate a file with a bad image in it. Since it sounds like Page View may be a trigger, leave that one and click though each document one by one. If the program hangs or crashes, then chances are good you found the culprit document. To get it out, I would lock the editor so that it never loads in the first place, then click on it in the Binder and move to the Trash, then empty the trash. Then you would drag in a a replacement copy of that document from your backup that doesn’t crash.
If there was substantial work done to the document since that backup, you may not want to delete the broken one but instead locate its file directly in the project format itself and remove it, hopefully finding a program that can load it successfully so that you can get the text out. LibreOffice or Word would be good, since those use their own, non-Mac text engines. I can help you locate and remove the file manually if you aren’t sure how to do that.
Hi AmberV thanks for your reply! There are no images/figures in my text at all. Lots of comments & footnotes etc but that’s it.
I just tried clicking through each doc in the new copy&paste file I made, with no problems this time – bit mysterious! If it happens again though I will try the steps you suggest – fingers crossed it doesn’t though!
thanks again
If you do see it come up again, and are able to narrow it down to a particular file, that may be something we could reproduce over here if we had the file or set of files in question. For example using the File/Save As… feature to create copy of the project and strip out all of the research and everything except for maybe one or two files, one that works and one that hangs sync and search index rebuild. If the problem is in the content itself, and not some weird peculiarity of your machine configuration, then we should be able to see the hang happen as well and better be able to fix it or advise you on how to repair the content.
Anyway, glad to hear things are going smoothly now!