Hello Simeon & Rick...

rdavis wrote:

I think I have hit NWP's limit on document length.
It is over 450 pages with footnotes, right-to-left
sections, and use of the graphic layer. I must have
hit a breaking point because opening the document
suddenly takes minutes, and when it does finally
open, adding a line into the document cause it to
hang (spinning beach ball).

In my experience, NW used to be slow at handling
multi-megabyte files, but has gotten much better.
But Anne asks a good question. In that regard, how
much RAM do you have? Many applications will slow
down or have other problems if they are working in
a crowded environment. This might not be your
problem, but it's the best place to start.

Iøve noticed the exact same as Simeon. Many of my documents are +150-200 pages with both graphics, heavy formattings and often one large table with more columns, but no footnotes or endnotes...

I once have used a stopwatch to see how long time it takes to open such a document to be ready for further writing + formatting. The longest took +6 mins. to open to write-ready. - My default document format is RTF.

I then thought that this couldn't be true, so I tried more times with same result... So I made an experiment.

- Opened a new blank document and set the margins and page headers and footers.
- Used the command 'Select Table Text' in the problematic 205pgs. document.
- Pasted the selected text into the blank document
- Created new table with inserted text.
- Formatted everything like in the original [it took it's time.:-)]
- Saved the new documentwith a new name to keep the original in case...
- Quit NWP
- Re-opened the new document
- Opening time to ready-to-write apprx. 2 mins!

Then I got really curious and opened the original RTF document in BBEdit 9. Here I saw informations for each and every time the document has been saved and closed, re-opened and then closed again. From the beginning I've set BBEdit to mark changes with red, so it was quite easy to see the changes and differences.

I now did the same with the new RTF document - and wasn't that surprised to see only _one_ intro information paragraph + very few characters for each time the document has been aborted.

To be sure that I saw what I saw I did the same with some larger MSWD2008 (.doc) and AWKS 6.2 (.cwk) documents and hereto I changed the suffix on a copy of the large NWP document from RTF to DOC to keep all formatting when opening this document in MSWD2008. It also took apprx. 6 mins. to open the original document in MSWord and apprx. 2 mins. for the new document.

In the real MSWD and AWKS documents - when opened in BBEdit - the intro and aborting information are located just where the document was saved and aborted - i.e. not in the beginning of the document, but where the cursor was, when I hit COM+S and COM+Q.

My conclusion is that it very well can be all that intro-, saving- and page information that slows down opening very large NWP documents. - But I also don't know how to 'fix' this problem - except for copying the content to a new blank document once in a while...

My main computer is a MacPro Xeon 4x2,66ghz with 14gb of pfysical memory, OS X 10.5.x, 10.6.x and 10.7.x. But it is the same on my G5 Dual 1,8ghz with 4gb of momory and OS X 10.4.x and 10.5.x.

Cheers, Erik Richard

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Erik Richard Sørensen, Member of ADC, <[log in to unmask]>
NisusWriter - The Future In Multilingual Text Processing - www.nisus.com
Openoffice.org - The Modern Productivity Solution - www.openoffice.org
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