Newbie

[benclawes01]

Hello everyone,

My name is Ben - I am using Scribus to typeset my first self-published novel. On the whole, I have found it an excellent package, especially considering that it is free and it is quite intuitive but have hit a major road block. By the time I have imported 300 odd pages into story editor to add styles etc, it runs like a snail. Is it possible to format one chapter (around 20 pages) at a time and then append them all at the end? I figure that if I can do this it would drastically reduce the working time!

Any advice please?

Many thanks,

Ben C. Lawes

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forum Ben.

There can be various reasons why Scribus is running slowly.

One reason that I hear often is when machine memory is low. There's not much you can do about that unless you want to spend money.

Another reason is that you could be importing too much text into a text frame chain (linked frames). If you have a text frame chain of more than a dozen or so pages worth then Scribus could have problems. The reason for this is that every small change to the text in the chain results in Scribus having to recalculate the positions of the rest of the characters in the chained frames. For example, deleting a character/word in the first linked frame could mean that all of the text that follows it needs to be moved. The best way to try and get round this is to split the chains up into chapters. It doesn't get round the problem totally but it might make things easier.

There could be other reasons but they depend on the document itself.

One thing you can do is to create each chapter in its own smaller SLA and, after exporting each SLA to PDF, stitch the PDFs together. How you can do this depends on your operating system as different OSes have different tools available. There are loads of PDF stitching/merging utilities available for free so you just have to do a search and try some until you find one you like.

TIP: Do not use an online service, unless you're absolutely sure about them, as they can take copyright off you. Be careful.

If you want to stitch PDFs together you will need to learn how to change the default page numbers in Document Setup so that each chapter starts on the right page number. This will have to be done at the end of your workflow - and in chapter order - so you get the right page numbers and the left/right pages are correct.

It's a bit of a faff but it's certainly do-able.

[benclawes01]

Thanks Garry!

I have a Mac with 32GB RAM so not short on resources. All my other programmes (I use Photoshop and Logic Audio for very power hungry activity!) work great.

It has slowed down all the more since introducing more styles. I wondered if it was that?

I will try what you suggested - I really appreciate your input. I have Matador awaiting!

Thanks,

Ben.

[GarryP]

You're welcome Ben.

It doesn't sound like your machine specs should be the cause of the problem.

Adding styles shouldn't - in all normal circumstances - make any noticeable difference. I don't know how Scribus uses them at code-level but I can't see why adding more or applying them more liberally would make much of a change to how quickly Scribus works in and of itself. It's possible, but I can't think of a reasonable reason why.

One thing I noticed when I was using my old Mac was if I had been using Scribus for more than a couple of hours it would start to slow down. I put this down to either the undo stack getting massive and taking up too much memory - I only had 2GB - or that some garbage disposal was not happening properly. Either way - or whatever it actually was - a re-boot of Scribus always sent it back to working quickly again, until a couple more hours had passed anyway.

Ah, I've just noticed that you're using the story editor. That's not really recommended, especially if you have a very long text chain. Every time you go into the story editor Scribus creates a copy of the text from the chain and if the chain is long it will always take a long time. Your best bet is to keep out of the story editor and apply your style changes to the text within the frames themselves (although, if you have a long text chain then that may be slow too).