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Known Participant
June 4, 2012
Question

Paragraph & Character Styles SO SLOW!

  • June 4, 2012
  • 16 replies
  • 26637 views

When I first heard that Adobe was going to put in paragraph and character styles in CS6 I thought, "Finally! Awesome!"

But, now that I have it and am using it I can't believe they have failed so hard in it. Every time I make a change in the style panel this little spinning dot wheel comes up and spins for at least a minute while think about making the change I made. This performance is unacceptable and needs to be addressed immediately. It even spins when I try to turn off the Preview checkbox.

I am using a Mac running 10.6.x and 8GB of memory. I have a lot of fonts installed, but that should NOT be an issue. It isn't with any other application.

Is there a way to speed things up?

This topic has been closed for replies.

16 replies

Participant
June 14, 2013

To be perfectly honest, this bug is easy enough to avoid and writing this will cost me more time than the bug has.

However, It would be great to get some sort of statement on whether or not you plan to work toward a solution for these issues.  Can we expect an update any time soon, or should we be looking for alternatives?  From what I can tell, it does not seem like there is a lot of effort (if any) going into resolving this. 

I thought the embarrassment of developing desktop publishing software that can be undermined by fonts would have prompted a little more action than it has. Considering this thread was started more than one year ago, I guess we're on our own.

Regards,

Ben

Kris Hunt
Legend
June 14, 2013

Burn.

jumpyoneAuthor
Known Participant
May 3, 2013

After all this time, I've created a video illustrating just how slow this feature works and that we who are complaining are not making this up...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ4-VxU1FU8

Jeff_Know1
Inspiring
December 8, 2012

Everytime I open up one of the dropdown menu's in the 'Character and Paragraph Styles panels', I also have roughly a 4 seconds delay.

Having Bridge running or not before opening Photoshop CS6 doesn't seem to make any difference on my pc.

However, setting the Drawing Mode to "Normal" instead of "Advanced" in the Preferences->Performance dialog box does make it work properly. After restarting Photoshop the delays are gone.

So I'm leaning towards believing it has something to do with particular videocards/drivers. (In my case an AMD Radeon HD 6770 on a Windows 7 PC)

So whenever I have to work with Type styles I temporarily set the drawing mode to "normal", save my work, restart Photoshop, then I can muck around with the Styles for awhile. Far from ideal, but it's a workaround for now.

-Jeffrey.

Participating Frequently
December 15, 2012

Hello Jeff,

So I was having the same problems you were having if not much worse I did 2 things to solve my problems with the styles and other issues.

1) I bought a new generation video card.  I got a Superclocked Nvidia 560Ti  with 448 cuda cores and 1250 mb of ram.  This sped things up considerably and most hangups were resolved but I was still having occasional lockups.

2) I found out that my hard drive was on its way out.  I would get an occasional I/O error but it was very rare so I didn't think much of it.  I'd get a new hard drive soon anyway so I figured I'd just slowly start backing things up for an eventual upgrade.  Well apparently CS6 is much more aggressive than older versions of photoshop as when I would work in CS3 I wouldn't experience much slow down at all.  But if I fired up CS6 I would lockup even after I upgraded my video card.   Well about that time the I/O errors started happening more frequently so I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my HD.

To my surprise CS6 runs like a racehorse now.  No problems, no lockups zip zip done.   So I would look into upgrading your video card and primary work HD to bring them up to par with CS6.  It worked for me.

Participating Frequently
November 18, 2012

I too am running into this problem.  I'm using Photoshop CS6 creative cloud on a windows 7 machine running SP1 on a 1st gen Core i7 with 24 gigs of ram and a 512 gig system drive with plenty of space to spare for a swap file and trying to create a text style locks up my computer and causes it to crash. 

Yes I have a lot of fonts installed in my windows font folder however that has never caused a problem with any previous version of photoshop nor does it cause any issues when I'm creating text styles within Indesign.

Also I too am experiencing general hits in speed and performance as well.  Most are minor but they are seemingling everywhere and those little hangups add up to minutes and eventually hrs.    I'm not sure if it's due to the new interface or the fact that it's connected to the cloud or something else but for professionals time is money and as a rule professionals will always choose the tool that is the fastest and most reliable for their given task.  If a newer tool is unreliable or it takes longer to accomplish the same tasks it effectively nullifies any gains achieved and we're going to reach back to the tools that are more reliable.

I really like the idea of text styles in photoshop but it needs to be as streamlined and as fast as it is in Indesign.

Question for those of you having performance hits... are you using the 32 bit version or the 64 bit version?    I'm currently using the 64 bit version and I'm curious if 32 bit users are experiencing the same problems. 

Known Participant
November 18, 2012

Yeah, I wouldn't hold your breath. It doesn't look like Adobe is even concerned with fixing these issues until maybe they release CS7.

Noel Carboni
Legend
November 19, 2012

I found something interesting today...  In an attempt to validate that I have no bad fonts, I ran Adobe's Font Test script.

Having run it, lo and behold I found many Paragraph Styles operations got about twice as fast.  Not instantaneous, but much better than before.

One of the options, which I left checked, was to Clear the Font Cache.  I don't know if this is what helped, but I suggest trying the Font Test script and see if it helps your performance:

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-fonts-photoshop-cs5.html#main_Solution_4__Use_the_FontTest_script_to_determine_if_there_are_damaged_fonts_on_your_computer_

-Noel

Participating Frequently
September 13, 2012

So I recently had the idea of why not see if I can't just make a blank document and make my paragraph styles for my design and just save it then load it to the actual design. This worked, partially. I had to have at least some kind of text in my "blank" doc that had a paragraph style applied to it, which was no big deal to me really so long as I can just make all the stylings and just load them up and apply them to my designs. So after doing that work around I figured I had won! not really, now that I'm able to load my paragraph styles I have them all but they all changed the fonts that were set, all the color / size etc. were the same but the fonts all changed. This has pretty much defeated the purpose of the work around, I don't know if anyone is having a similar problem when loading paragraph styles or not but this is a problem.

I really want to be able to use this feature, and I'm trying to do some work arounds but its getting increasingly harder to even want to touch that aspect of photoshop :/

I hope you guys are looking into this I'm not sure what else I can do to get this feature to work but it would help my work flow a lot if I can use it.

Known Participant
August 28, 2012

Tired of waiting for Adobe to fix this issue (as well as other issues), which is clearly affecting many users besides myself. Probably many more users than even posted here. I have canceled my Creative Cloud membership.

CS6 has been out for 4 months now. It's not like Adobe hasn't had time to address the bugs. The features in CS6 are not worth  the subscription price + the hassel of dealing with these bugs + my wasted time trying to use features that simply do not work as they should.

Participating Frequently
August 27, 2012

Painfully slow here too - on Mountain Lion 16GB, as it was previously under Lion. Even Mountain Lion clean-install  was fresh - i.e. had no fonts installed other than the defaults from a clean-install, i got the same issue.

I'm inclined to feel that until it's worked out what causes the problem, using the feature actually consumes more time to use than it saves.

A real shame given that it's intention is to speed workflow up not slow it down.

Rob.

InfoSport_AL
Participant
August 20, 2012

FontAgent Pro (FAP) is pretty good at ferreting out problem fonts , finding many that Font Book and Font Doctor miss. 

They have a fully functional 30-day demo version

jumpyoneAuthor
Known Participant
August 20, 2012

Turning off the graphics processor setting did make mine go a little faster when changing a paragraph style, but it still was not as fast as Fireworks or Illustrator or InDesign. And I still got the spinning dot wheel for about 10 seconds when I changed a font setting from 13px to 20px where it was applied to 5 instances in the document.

My graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 4850

I still do not think this is a font issue.

Participating Frequently
August 20, 2012

GPU problem and fonts it will not. I tried everything and the problem persists. As I wrote above, makes it as the graphics card ATI and nVidia

Participant
August 19, 2012

My character styles were very slow too. I turned off the Use Graphics Processor setting in performance handling. It resolved the issue for me. Hope that helps.

Noel Carboni
Legend
August 19, 2012

Gskwed, your problem sounds like a display driver bug.

Have you updated your display driver from the web site of the maker of your video card?  What video card do you have?

-Noel

Participant
August 19, 2012

AMD Radeon HD 6750M. Haven't updated since I bought the macbook in June.