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ukzembla
Known Participant
February 14, 2019
Answered

Working reasonably on one 900-page paragraph…

  • February 14, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 646 views

This is an odd question, but I'm going to be typesetting a pretty unusual / experimental book – it's a single sentence and it's going to be about 900–1000 pages long. I've worked on a preliminary draft to test the waters and it seems that InDesign (all versions I've tried) is intolerably slow. I understand why this might be the case, but e.g. placing the cursor on the page and deleting a single character can take upwards of a minute, and if I have any corrections at all to make (and I inevitably will), this is going to become incredibly time-consuming. Could anyone recommend ways of making this more workable? I thought of chopping the book up into several stories, though that's not really ideal since there are no natural breaks and there may be some later reflow as a result of corrections. I don't think doing things like disabling preflight makes much difference, but there is some strange behaviour: e.g. clicking at a point in the text with the mouse gives me spinny wheel for a good minute, but navigating with cursor keys from there is considerably faster – moving left / right / up / down using individual cursor strokes is instant, but to skip a word I get spinny wheel for another minute. Any and all suggestions welcome – even experimenting on ways to speed things up means a lot of waiting around for things that probably aren't going to work!

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Correct answer Steve Werner

It sounds pretty impossible actually. But one thing which would make a big difference would be to choose Adobe Single Line Composer instead of Adobe Paragraph Composer. The former only tries to compose one line at a time. The latter needs to compute the line breaks for the entire paragraph, which you can deduce would be a little time consuming.

3 replies

John Mensinger
Community Expert
John MensingerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 14, 2019

^Good suggestions above.

What's it like if you do the editing in Story Editor?

    Steve Werner
    Community Expert
    Steve WernerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 14, 2019

    Story Editor is a good idea.

    Also, do most of the editing ahead of time in Microsoft Word or the like before placing it. Try to copyfit based on then word count.

    U
    ukzemblaAuthor
    Known Participant
    February 14, 2019

    Thanks so much for the suggestions, everybody! I've just downloaded the latest version of InDesign (had last tried this autumn last year), switched to single-line composer, removed all grep styles (I did have a few, but mostly they wouldn't have been applied to this book), and have disabled my preflighting and it actually seems quite reasonable to edit now! Story editor is also an excellent idea – I hadn't thought of that, but it actually now looks like it won't be necessary. Thanks so much for the help, I was dreading this but looks like it'll all be fine. I had already stressed that the editing and even some proofreading would be done in Word beforehand, so I'm hoping correx are minimal. As always, it depends very much on the author though.

    vinny38
    vinny38
    Legend
    February 14, 2019

    Interesting question.

    My first thought would be to try to use the Sinlge line composer instead of the paragraph one.

    I would also temporarely try to disable auto-reflow and definitely forget about Grep styles, and column spanning or splitting.

      Steve Werner
      Community Expert
      Steve WernerCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
      Community Expert
      February 14, 2019

      It sounds pretty impossible actually. But one thing which would make a big difference would be to choose Adobe Single Line Composer instead of Adobe Paragraph Composer. The former only tries to compose one line at a time. The latter needs to compute the line breaks for the entire paragraph, which you can deduce would be a little time consuming.

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