John Beardmore wrote >I suppose until 1.3.5 is released, there isn't much point in >comparing experiences in detail, but maybe once 1.3.5 is out we >should all contribute the following information for our larger >projects ?
OK. I took a few minutes to play with this. I tried copying the text from a friend's book I'm working on in another application. It is 318 6x9 pages in 15 chapters. I first copied just the first chapter which came out to 9 pages with a single text frame covering most of each page. At this point, the document was disturbingly unresponsive, but not as bad as John Jason Jordan described. Mouse and keyboard input seemed about equally unresponsive, although some keyboard input (such as page up, page down, home, and end) seemed to be completely ignored. At this point, I could still work in it, but it would have been annoying. To see how bad it would get, I then inserted another 300 pages and copied the remaining text into a second chain of text boxes not linked to the first chain. This gave me a document with 309 pages. The first nine pages had linked text boxes with 19,682 characters (including spaces) in 3,233 words. The next 300 pages had a second chain of linked text boxes, although the text (648,579 characters in 106,152 words) occupied only 296 pages. The responsiveness of this larger document was pretty much indistinguishable from the responsiveness of the shorter document. Scrolling was fairly slow, page up and down didn't work at all. Clicking to select a text box to edit it was fairly quick, but not as quick as I would like. Moving text boxes with the arrow keys was slow but useable. Typing took about half a second per character. Processor 1.86 GHz Intel Core Duo RAM 2 GB, of which Scribus was occupying 1.49 GB OS Mac OS X 10.5.7 Page size 6x9 Pages 300 Linked 300 Chars 600,000 Scribus 1.3.5 I suspect that the fact that my RAM was maxed out may be part of what is slowing things down. Therefore, I tried restarting the machine and opening only Scribus with this document. Scribus was occupying about 300 MB after I first opened the document. Moving about in the document was about the same as it was when I pasted the first text in the original document and the memory used did not change as I moved around. However, as soon as I entered a text frame and started typing, the memory started going up pretty quickly. With each character I typed, the memory used increased by about 10 MB and it soon took up the entire 1.6 GB that was available. I then closed Scribus down completely and restarted it with a fresh document. After inserting a single text frame on the only page, I tried typing. The memory used stayed steady at about 60 MB. This makes me wonder if there is a memory leak in 1.3.5. I know that 1.3.5 rc3 is just a release candidate. Given that I don't expect to use it in the near future for any production work, that seems like the right one for me to be evaluating. Best, John
