I’ve started a new writing project using Scrivener and I’m finding that with this one particular file each time I go to work on it, the Mac spinning wheel shows up and continues to spin for several seconds. It eventually stops but as soon as I start typing again it reappears.
Needless to say it’s quite irritating and really slows down the writing.
But it appears to be only with this one file which doesn’t have nearly as much data in it as other files that are working fine. The one thing it does have that the others don’t (as best I can tell) are some research files that connect to the web sites on the internet. Not sure if that’s what is causing this or not.
If so, is there a way to work around this without deleting those files. I’d really like to keep them but not if it means I have to deal with the spinning wheel thing.
The main thing that I am aware of that can cause this sort of problem—where it is just some files in the binder, or just one project acting up rather than everything—is the inclusion of large pictures in the text files. These can slow down writing a bit, though it is rare that they will on a newer machine. Do the text files themselves have pictures embedded in them?
If not, you could try making a new blank project, dragging the contents of the Draft over to the new project, and then try typing there. Does the problem persist or go away? I don’t propose that as a solution, but rather a test to see where the problem exists—in the files themselves or something in the project. You can discard the test project once you’ve determined that.
I’m not aware of anything, imported into the binder, that would cause typing lag. The most that would do is cause backups to slow down if there are hundreds of megabytes or more in the project. While working, the entire project is not continually saved, only the parts that have changed since the last save. But maybe there is a bug. Generally speaking, imported webarchive files that rely upon an Internet connection to function do not work well. I’ve never seen them impact performance though.
With your help I think I tracked down the bothersome image that was slowing down the works. I took an image of it, then deleted the old image and when I imported the new one, it seemed to correct the slow down.
Great! It was probably a high resolution graphic designed for print output rather than digital display. When you took a screenshot, it captured only the pixels that the display could work with, thus reducing the “density” of it, and making it much smaller and more efficient to work with.