Two problems with Scribus 1.5.3 running under Mac OSX

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calyptorhynchus

1. I work on a document, export it as a PDF, it's exactly how I want it. I close the file. The next time I open it the page layout has changed, somehow, somewhere in the document lines have been pushed over the page and the pagination is out. Weird

2. My Mac is a fairly recent one with lots of RAM and processing power, I never have difficulty with any other program not opening files, not being able to work with files &c. .sla files over about 500k are very slow to open and edit, like I will wait 5 minutes for a file to open, it takes 1 minute to go to certain page, if I edit the keystrokes take 20 seconds to register &c. I have one file over 2 megabytes which takes hours to open and is so slow that it is uneditable. Surely Scribus should be able to handle large files, what about publications with lots of graphics?

Any advice on either problem gratefully received.

RodneyLee

Ouch, wish I could help, on Linux my biggest file so far is 4.2 mb. loads with out a hitch and takes maybe a minute, scrolling to pages is instant, everything works as expected...

GarryP

Welcome to the forum calyptorhynchus.

For point 1, Scribus 1.5.x is developmental software and will contain weird issues. I would recommend using the stable 1.4.6 instead, but you can't open 1.5.x files in 1.4.6.

For point 2, again, you're using experimental software so it's difficult to know how it should perform as there could be any number of unknown bugs and under-test functions in there. When there's so much stuff being changed, who knows what it's going to do?

Having said that, a 500KB SLA isn't very big and should open in seconds. Even a 2MB SLA isn't what I would call huge.

I've just done a quick test - 120 pages containing the entire text of Frankenstein and 10 large hi-res images, saves to a 1.16MB SLA. It took less than three seconds to load on my machine, and scrolling is instant.

Scribus can handle large files - and plenty of people have proved that - but you need the memory to handle the entire document and the processing power to shift things around. It sound like you have those so that's probably not the problem.

I used to have slow-down issues with long Scribus sessions on OS X - which I put down to some kind of memory leakage issue - but frequently closing and re-opening Scribus got around that.

I don't use either 1.5.x or OS X anymore so I can't really help much more.
Maybe someone with a similar set-up to you will have some better answers.

a.l.e

1. should not happen.
very soon 1.5.4 should come out. try if it still happens with the newest code. if so, please post your document and steps to reproduce to the bug tracker (https://bugs.scribus.net)

2. it all depends on what is in those 550 KB
   there are a few things that scribus does not like, one of them being very long chains of text frames.

in my experience, 1.5 is pretty snappy, but on my computer it mostly has lot of memory at its disposal...

calyptorhynchus

I used to use only to use the stable version, but I went up to 1.5.3 to see if a new version would fix the problem, it did for a bit, then things slowed down again.

I'll try 5.4 when it comes out.

When you say "there are a few things that scribus does not like, one of them being very long chains of text frames" you mean lots of different text frames? My docs are usually long texts, but usually in the one frame, flowing from page to page.

a.l.e

you should break from time to time the flow of your linked frames.
as an example, by creating a flow for each chapter.

in 1.5 you can break it and keep the text in place.

drop shadows are also a feature that will make your comptuer crawl (if you use it / if you use it too much)

calyptorhynchus

That might be it then, I'd kind of assumed that one long text frame was better than separate ones.... the wrong way round! In future documents I'll have separate chapters.

a.l.e

james, how do you start scribus?
buy double clicking a document or through the application icon?

if it's the first case, can you try to open it "directly"? without any document?

ciao
a.l.e

a.l.e

yes, you can get scribus from here https://www.scribus.net/downloads install it and then open with it your scribus files!

AdmFubar

Are there any images in this file? If so and they are large and resized this may be the cause.
Has there been any recent updates to OSX? Something may be broken (or fixed) in an update that causes this issue.
Using Scribus 1.6.1, openSUSE 15.5
Advanced hobbyist