Long delay after text changes?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

What IS it that causes a document to gain that maddening delay after every text edit? When every change causes a pause/freeze of ten seconds or more before it 'snaps' into place?

I am working on a book I've updated for years, nothing fancy, one simple text flow, only graphics are two instances of a simple logo. In today's editing session, it started doing that behavior: every edit in the text flow, even ones only affecting one line, causes a long freeze while I hear the CPU fan rev up. I've scanned through for any odd layout faults, saved to IDML and restarted ID. Behavior persists. Other documents, even much longer and more complex ones, are not so affected.

I know it's some detail I changed that is now making ID have to do a full downstream reformat on each tap, but I have no idea what. I don't use GREP styles, so it's nothing like that.

Any ideas?

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[Scott Falkner]

Is there a lot of text spread over a lot of pages/text frames? It can take time to reflow long documents when doing changes near the beginning of a story, especially if there is text wrap applied later in the story.

Another feature I have found that can slow things down considerably is GREP Styles. I hade a medium length documnent, maybe 50 pages. I used GREP Styles in the body copy (and any child styles) that applied a colour to any of a few different pieces of text. Just colour, not changing fonts, sizes, or weights. But editing text was a very slow and furstrating process. I duplicated the bopy copy styles and removed the GREP from the duplicates, then used Find/Change to apply the duplicates. This effectively removed and GREP formating from the story. Lo-and-behold the file sped up and text editing was much more responsive.

So look to see if you are using and GREP Styles in your formatting. If you can temporarily turn GREP off you might find the program is much faster.

[Peter Kahrel]

Cross-references, especially those to other documents? Hyperlinks to websites? Images with links to an external server?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Nope, none of the above, nor Scott's suggestions. As I said, it's a very simple book, only 180 pages, mostly flowing encyclopedia-like entries of stacked text. Absolutely nothing fancy except a few double-column pages in the beginning.

I have worked on this book in cycles for quite some time and never had any trouble with it, although I have run into this annoying bug on other documents occasionally. Usually, I can wade through the edits and be done, but this is a long, slow format cleanup and I'd like to not spend a week on it.

I think I know what caused it, though. Up until know, it's been a "top down" spacing stack, with each element in the stack having its spacing on the top. For structural reasons, I changed it — five core styles — to "bottom  down" spacing, so that they have zero spacing on top and the separator spacing on the bottom. I went back to the last version, nearly identical, and test edits were normal. Back to this version, and it's tap-and-wait, tap-and wait. For some reason ID really, really doesn't like managing the spacing set this way, even though it's functionally and visually identical to the last version.

Any thoughts at a workaround or way to make ID happy with it welcome...

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[Peter Kahrel]

> A few double-column pages in the beginning

Are those columns created by column-splitting? That can cause edit delays.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The problem - the delay - is most pronounced on early pages and gets shorter as I make edits towards the end. The two-column stuff is on master pages, not overrides to the document pages. It's also been a part of the layout for several versions now.

I tried reversing the spacing scheme (which was experimental anyway) to all top spacing, as I've done all along, and it did not address the issue.

I gave up. I went back to the last good version (iteration 10 or 15 without any such problems) and started over. Made essentially all the same changes (although I've lost a day of minor edits, grumble grumble) and zero 'delay' issues. I might do the "delete pages" process on the bad file to see if I can isolate the problem, though.

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[Peter Spier]

Could be a corrupt page. Maybe copy pages to a new file would cure it.