Document (.fm) opens slowly. Gets worse over time.

Report · May 26, 2011

A co-worker just ran into this one. A book component file that should have opened in seconds was taking five minutes, and taking longer after every save.

After ruling out import problems, I saved out a MIF and scrolled through it looking for anything odd, and found it - a repeating string in an Xref.

There were callout text frames in a figure with circular cross-refererences to each other. One of them was apparently supposed to be "1" with a Marker, and the other just an Xref to it by text. At some point someone had changed the original marked text to an Xref to the other Xref (or possibly to itself - Frame was so unresponsive when attempting to diagnose that we just had to kill the process, reopen, delete the entire callout flow and fix it).

The displayed text was now "111111..." and apparently growing with each open/save cycle. Frame evidently doesn't detect this type of circular reference.

The only visible indication during edit was the subtle "____" at the bottom of the callout text frames, indicating text that has flowed out of sight.

Although I wouldn't expect a DTP application to have sophisticated loop detection, it would be nice if Frame could search for text frame overflows, if not hidden text generally. Frame obvious detects it, because it sets the frame border solid.

_________

A text inset containing a text inset is probably also fertile ground for runaway recursion.

Report · May 26, 2011

Excellent troubleshooting, bravo - and thank you for posting, too, discoveries like this are gold dust.

If you open the MIF again as FM, in other words doing the "MIF wash" routine, does FM complain about and/or correct the error?

For anybody reading this, the freebie MIFBrowse utility is absolutely essential for spelunking into MIF; even though it hasn't been updated for a long time it works perfectly still:

http://www.grahamwideman.com/gw/tech/framemaker/mifbrowse.htm

Report · May 26, 2011

If you open the MIF again as FM, in other words doing the "MIF wash" routine, does FM complain about and/or correct the error?

First thing we tried. No fix or complaints from Frame (7.1 Unix, btw).

"A text inset containing a text inset is probably also fertile ground for runaway recursion."

Yep. Tried it, just to see. Frame allows it, and the recursions grow for a couple of iterations, at which point it throws an "Unresolved Inset" error, which Find [Unresolved Inset] cannot find.