Quark Forums

Literally.

I've been working with 7.5 for the last month or so and it's "killing" me! Slow, slow, and slow. I have it on some authority that the text engine was completely re-written for OSX in this version. Doing that though lead to this on PPC systems (at least in my case)t:

"QuarkXPress is recalculating the text flow and draw information every time the text is pushed or added to. While this isn’t a problem in smaller layouts with fewer columns, in the case of a file like yours every single line on the page is recalculated and redrawn every time you enter a word or line."

This is really now starting to affect me. I had a 12 page pub I had to get out on Friday that I ended up having to finish in QXP 6.x (which is using OS9 calls and NOT recalcuting every line of text) because it was slowing to a crawl. I'm awaiting some resolution on this issue. In the meantime I tried going back to 7.3, which didn't really help.

However, there are some other things that bug me that perhaps someone might have insight to or a fix.

Highlighting of a grouped and anchored box containing text with the content tool is miserably thin. You can barely see it. QXP6.x reversed the objects highlighted this way so you knew you had it selected. Viewed at less than say 75% you can barely see what you have selected this way.

Select a hard return and use the key combo for a soft return and you get a soft return plus the old hard return when using the Typesetting mode.

Back to the anchored items. I paste them in and all of a sudden the runaround on them get's ignored and the text that is supposed to be beneath the anchored item jumps up behind it. This is annoying to correct in a Classified document.

Import of pics is slow. Updating pics from the Usage menu is slow. (Yes, I work over a network which Quark says is a no-no, but XPress 6.x has ZERO trouble with speed on this issue, network or not).

I like this program, but unless I get these issues resolved there isn't enough here to justify me staying on 7.x. I'm going to have to rollback to 6.x if this doesn't get worked out. (8.x is not an option at this time.)

Anyone got any ideas?

Oh yeah, one more thing. I can have every app I need open (PS, Illy, Firefox, Acrobat, Word, Entourage, iTunes, Suitcase and some others) and no issue with slow down in QXP 6.x. But to get any kind of a minimal speedup with 7.x I have to close some of these apps. I think that that is really stupid given that I have a 1.8ghz processor with 4 Gigs of RAM and 2-435GB drives. I suspect this is related to the text thing, but I don't really know. Also, I shouldn't have to quit QXP 7.x occaisionally just to get some speed back (it slows over time).

Erik today I have a q7 file with hundreds of text boxes that is taking ages for the SBOD to leave the screen, 1 page is taking 20 minutes to postscript and that postscript is only 3MB. Im on a G5 but I'll try the same file on an intel tomorrow and see if it makes a difference.

 Glenn, I'd bet that it will run much faster on the Intel Mac. I'm told that all the optimization they've done for version 7.x was intended to speed it up on the Intel Macs. Unitentionally I think, it's had a crushingly slow effect on Motorola based PowerPC macs.

My old Quicksilver 2002 ran Quark 6 pretty darn well for a 6 year old machine, but slowed to an unusable crawl when I went to Quark 7. I ended up replacing it with an Intel machine since it was about time anyway. I know your G5 is exponentially faster than the Quicksilver, but the experience sounds about the same.

And a coworker just replaced a fairly well equipped G5 with a new Intel box, and we've seen a significant speed increase. As in, it runs like it's supposed to.

So I've come to the same conclusion: Quark 7's optimization works great on Intel machines, while PPC machines suffer poor performance.

So it's not just you.

 Thanks. That's my understanding. Unfortunately for me, this G5 is probably a once in a decade purchase (Mac's being far more expensive than PCs). So, the likelihood of seeing an Intel Mac anytime soon is nil. To give perspective, the other two Macs here are G4 400/450s, circa 1999.

Likewise, purchasing an update to v8.x isn't going to happen either. Hopefully they will fix this. We'll see I guess.

For what it is worth, we have 2 PPC G5, 2.3 GHz, and 2.5 GB RAM and Quark 7.31 is running at a good speed.

 Thanks for that. No offense, but can you define "good speed?" Is this good speed with multipage documents that have multicolumns of text at small point sizes?

Did you try to delelete/remove all full res previews. I learned that only one full res preview in a 7 document can create huge delays while working. Avoid TIFF files. Use PS EPS with embedded 8 bit preview. This shoud help also. Let me know…

On the intel, for my file, my screen redraw delays are much improved dropping to a few seconds rather than about 40 seconds on the dual 2.0GHz G5. Well thats the story with quark7, but switching to quark8 on the intel and the delays are worse (but still much improved over the PPC). To put this into perspective there are about 100 small text boxes on this page filled with yellow text. In order to create an extruded drop shadow effect, each of these yellow text boxes has been step and repeated a fraction and coloured up black but I deleted each grouped step one at a time and there are 103 of them. To paraphrase Douglas Adams never underestimate the ingenuity of idiots.

Ummm, "good speed" means no speed issues whatsoever. We've got multipage documents, not many columns, if there are any, and not much small point sizes. That maybe the difference.

We're using 7.31 too, wonder if that would make a difference for you.

 7 does ok with just our one page ad documents. But the multipage, multicolumn ones just kill me.

Don't know if I'm willing to try 7.31 at the moment. I tried 7.3, but I still had issues and copy/pasting of libary items started crashing XPress. I'm just hoping they will fix this.

 <GASP> Hack, hack, cough, cough, chOKE! Ahhhcccckkkkk! 

We get similar issues with Q7.5 on our intel G5 macs. We use thousands of single page documents with two columns of text and images. They all work great and have no issues with speed. We have a catalog that has chapters reaching 80-100 pages, hundreds of images and each page's text column is linked to the next. Those start to slow down, but are still managable. They are large files though (up to 60 MB sometimes). Then we have an index chapter file. 57 pages, no images, five columns of text per page and all the text boxes linking to the next. It crawls and is really unstable. Click around and make changes to fast without letting the prgram catch up and Quark takes a nose dive. It's always been a frustrating chapter to work on.

So, I'm tired of iTunes 8 eating my CPU. So I go in and turn some more stuff off (I've already shut off some other stuff previously. I also open System Prefs and shut off some QT stuff. So, now my CPU is in a range I can handle. So, I'm playing iTunes and working in XPress and guess what. There's a small speed bump! Not anything impressive, but it's almost where I can tolerate the slowness. So I ask. What in God's holy name does iTunes and Quicktime have to do with XPress 7.x? Other than the fact that QT is integrated into the OS and iTiunes I know makes some calls on QT, but geez – it affects XPress?

 Erik,
I don’t know if this will help regarding the slow text flow, but I’ve recently been working on a series of price lists, each 16 pages of A4 size.
The first couple of price lists were no trouble at all, even when working directly off a small portable USB drive. Inserting or deleting was instantaneous.
The third price list behaved differently. There was a delay with every keystroke.
I moved the job off the external onto the hard disc, and no change.
The only other difference between this price list and the previous two is that this one is imposed in printers pairs. As soon as I “unimposed” it to make a document of 16 single pages, keystokes became instantaneous again.
I’ve been doing these price lists for several years now and never noticed a problem when doing them in Quark 5.

Quark 7.5, Intel iMac, 2Gb

 

Phil