Quark Forums

Thanks Phil for the suggestion. It correlates to the multicolumn text box issue. I'm not using printer spreads and this slowness occurs even when I'm working local. I was doing all my formatting in a single column box and then pasting in to the main document for awhile, but after awhile that just got old. This needs to be fixed.

I'd try using 6 one column text boxes, but my recent experiences with two of the pubs I set disabused me of that notion. I had to do them in QXP 6 to get anything done.

I've been told that Quark 7.5 has issues running with Tiger on some machines, but that an upgrade to Leopard would fix it. I have occasional agonizing slowdowns on my old G4, but restarting Quark usually fixes it. I've never noticed any problem on the Intel at work (also using Tiger) but someone I spoke with about our set-up said they were surprised it was working. So I can't verify the diagnosis or the solution, but it might be worth passing on the info for whatever it's worth.

 Thanks for that. I can quit XPress and then reload it and I get some speed back. I've done that a few times, but even the best speed I can manage with as many apps closed as I can afford, XPress reniced, font caches cleaned, JAWS folder deleted, etcetera – that speed is still SLOWER than QXP 6.52 with all of my working/entertainment apps open and the Mac needing maintenance.

 It's an issue with the optimization of the Motorola chip. Going to Leopard might help me, but there's no budget for that right now. I'm still waiting to hear back on this issue (I sent some files a while back and was told that the underlying problem (not the files) was being looked at). To date I haven't heard back. I believe in the people at Quark so I know that the delay is because they have other things to do then to simply concentrate on my problem alone – and I hope they may be working on the issue.

In any case, right now, I'm stuck with what I have.

 Well, there has been no resolution on this for me.Going back to Q6 is not an option for me now as Q6 doesn't want to print from our Xante's Cassette tray (Tabloid). I tested ID CS2 (we have it for our Macs to be compatible with Editorial) with exported text from our legal documents. Seems to be handling it very well with the speed I am accustomed to under QX6.

Look's like I'm heading down the ID road unfortunately. To be honest I think I knew it was coming. Freehand was better than Illy and XPress is better than ID, but this slowdown is still killing me and ID has proven in the past that it just works.

Erik,

 A G5 is considerably slower than any of the Intel Macs, but I suspect the main problem is the multi-column setup. There have been a few performance problems with that and if I remember, some fixed in 7.x releases and a few in 8.x releases. Not sure who at Quark you were working with before, but I'll PM you so you can send me a sample file.

 

Regards,

Rob Keeble

Tech Lead | Text & Typography | QuarkXPress

 Rob, I understand that my G5 is slower than an Intel Mac. But if we use that reasoning then QuarkXPress 6.52 on my Mac utilizing the same files should be the same. It's not. 6.52 performs with these files like a Ferrari. 7.5 performs like a Chevrolet Chevette on the Interstate 5 Grapevine in California.

I was working with Craig Lanning, who according to Mike Berkow is no longer with the company. Here is Craig's last correspondance on the issue to me:

 Hi Erik,

I have a response back from R&D on this issue. It turns out that, while there are some minor issues related to performance on PPC, what is really causing the behavior is the way all versions of QuarkXPress 7 calculate and draw text in layouts similar to yours that have multiple columns.

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.

In QuarkXPress 8 we changed the text engine so that it no longer recalculates the text flow every time the text is pushed to the next line. Instead, it simply pushes the text and only needs to redraw it in the new position. There is some further tweaking to be done on the draw side of things, but that is why you are seeing such slow behavior on these pages in version 7 and not in version 8.

I have a meeting with our text engineer on this issue to gather more specifics, and once this happens I’ll post a response in the forum topic and add a Knowledge Base article that covers this topic.

Craig Lanning
Solutions Manager - VKB

 and a clarification:

The text engine in all versions prior to version 7 used the older OS 9 Mac Toolbox calls to calculate/render text. This was also true for version 6, where the Toolbox calls were sent through the OS X buffer before being rendered on screen. This, by the way, is why the text draw in version 6 was so “globby” at certain view percentages, but it was faster.
This recalculation probably has to do with the way the new text engine was created to take advantage of the X-Draw and Quartz anti-ailasing features, along with the ability to draw glyphs outside of box regions.

I’ll keep you posted on what I hear from the engineer later this week.
Cheers,
--Craig

I waited 2 months and then gave up. But Mike has been very helpful and at least the ball is rolling now. BTW, I sent you files. Thanks.

 Well. Here is the follow up to this. Unfortunately, there is no resolution. QXP 7.x does not handle multi-column text boxes very well. That includes one box with multiple columns, or multiple single-column boxes. This is particularly bad at smaller font sizes. I have 4 multi-column documents each week for our legal sections at 10.333 inches by 16 inches, 5pt type with 5pt leading. In addition I set 2 quarterly publications at the same page size using multiple text boxes. All of these documents have multiple pages. QXP 7 just chokes. Three engineers so far have confirmed this.

Apparently there was optimization done for both 7.x and 8.x both Intel and PPC, but I seem to be the only person who has reported this issue. So. It will be addressed in a future update/upgrade I guess. In the meantime since going to version 8.x won't fix this I'm stuck editing these documents in version 6.x Or InDesign.

Had 4 pages of 6 columns by 16 inches of 5pt type at 5pt leading this week for our legals. 2.5 hours to format because of this. QXP 6.52 would have take me 45 minutes!

eyoungren:

Had 4 pages of 6 columns by 16 inches of 5pt type at 5pt leading this week for our legals. 2.5 hours to format because of this. QXP 6.52 would have take me 45 minutes!

Good grief, Eric. Those legal beagles must have amazing eyesight to read 5 pt type. So sorry you've having issues with this. I just upgraded from 6.52 to 7.5, but also got myself a MacBookPro with latest Leopard. After reading about your trauma, haven't dared to load Quark 7.5 onto my old PPC laptop w/OS 10.4.11. I know upgrades are an ongoing issue with your work situation, but given all the time it takes you to wrestle these files into shape, wouldn't it make fiscal sense for them to at least upgrade your PPC to Leopard? It can be done, yes? I mean, there is a Leopard upgrade for the PPC ... at least I was told there was when I inquired a few months ago, and that my local Mac dealer could order one for me. Then again, I'm not too sure I trust the local store, so maybe they gave me the wrong info.

Well, actually we're only about a point size smaller than the leading legal/government paper in Phoenix. The Arizona Capitol Times (I worked there for 2.5 years) puts out over 80+ pages of legals in 6pt type with 6pt leading. Also in 6 columns. But they do most of the legals for the entire state and their system is pretty automated (it comes in at 6/6). So we aren't too much off their size.

To be completely honest too – no one reads these except legal junkies. As long as the government lawyers can read the type then the legal requirements for the amount of runs in the paper have been met. It doesn't matter a whit if the average person can't read it or the person the legal is aimed at. It's been published.

 Leopard is available on Amazon.com. But here's my problem. My coworker has a G4/450 AGP with 924mb of RAM. The company likes to keep everything consistent OS and program wise so if we upgraded my G5 to Leopard I'd have to upgrade her G4 too. Not possible according to Apple because you need like a 1.0ghz processor or so to run Leopard. I can get around this with LeopardAssist which fools the installer disk in to thinking there is the minimum specs. But with Leopard taking 512mb of ram that leaves my coworker with a paltry 424mb to run apps. Better to stick with Tiger. I'm not too sure Leopard would fix the issue either. All the way around it would be better if we both went to Intel Macs. But when every cost is being analyzed at the moment (and I do mean every cost) this isn't going to happen. I'm stuck with it until things improve enough that I can prevail upon my boss to make the necessary purchases. It does make fiscal sense, but it just isn't going to happen with the economy as it is now.

QUARKXPRESS 8.X YOU'RE FREAKING KILLING ME HERE! 

Are you saying Q8 makes no difference in performance on PPC Macs? We've definitely seen the text heavy doc slowdown issue in 7 with G5s, but I was hoping that when we go to Intel Macs we won't.

XPress 8.x is exactly the same as v7.x concerning text heavy documents on PPC Macs. I had hoped at the time that there would be a difference, but there is not. I'm still doing our legals and the two quarterlies I set in 6.52. Have to say I hate scrolling through a document and then getting the beach ball while XPress renders the pages with text. I'm in the habit now of creating the galleys for the news pages in 6.52, thumbnail dragging over my legal pages and making final adjustments and then opening that document in 8.x to place my ads. I just can't do it all anymore in 7.x or 8.x because they are both too slow. 20-30 seconds between beachballs when leading text. It's just nuts!

But all of that is on PPC Macs. As I understand it there is no issue on Intel Macs. As I hear it 7.x and 8.x perform just as fast (if not faster) as 6.x on Intel Macs. But I don't have a PPC Mac so the code is not optimized for me. 

 Possibly an update on this. We've been having network issues with both our Macs and PCs locking up and crashing when connected to the server. Been getting worse. Now I am at the point of logging out each night because sooner or later my Mac locks up.

Today, I noticed on boot (I boot in Verbose mode)  the comment: USB caused wake event (EHCI). I have only two things connected via USB. A powered hub and a keyboard with mouse. Normally my processor hovers around 20%+. So I pulled the powered hub Voila, CPU went down to 8%. Programs are opening faster, copy process is not running the CPU at 50%+ and various other little things. So, I am speculating that this USB hub has been malfunctioning for quite some time and I didn't know it. My guess is somehow it's been feeding back in to the network through my G5 and affecting everybody else.

This G5 is also the early Feb. 2005 model which had sleep issues. Corrected by a firmware update in 2006 I nevertheless run it with NO sleep settings and Highest for the processor setting. Too many issues back then of not getting the G5 to wake up.

XPress is definetly faster. Still not like QXP 6.x, but faster. I'll keep an eye on this and come back with an update later.

Hi Erik,

I've seen your post just now.

Three tears ago I was working with v.7.3, on WinXP. My magazine used to have text on two or three columns, some articles having  4 or 5 pages, with pictures inserted here and there. Quark was killing me too, there were moments when I could'n do anything without crashing of my Quark. After restarting, the same warning message appeard: «the text may reflow».

Because there are some similitudes between your problem and mine, I think it is better to describe what I've learned.

First: I was working on Win, not on MacOS, so the problem may be generated not by the OS (or its text rendering engine), but by Quark software (I've read all previous posts of this thread).

Second: this problem appeard to be solved by upgrading to v.7.5, BUT although Quark didn't crashed any more, some strange behaviour of text lines remained (sometimes, this happens also in v.8 to 8.5, that's why I believe the problem isn't entirely solved). And this is available for text on columns, extending on two or more pages (I usually have 9 pt. text with a 10 pt. leading).

 

What I've discovered when I was working with v.7.3:

1. After identifying the paragraph with problems (that one where Quark was crushing again and again), I made a text box on pasteboard, with the same width as the width of my text column.

2. I selected the paragraph with problems and pasted it in the new text box from the pasteboard.

3. I made my necesary text adjusting or proofing (or inserting a new paragraph or whatever I had to do).

4. Then I selected all text in the new text box, copied it to clipboard, then pasted it in the multicolumn text box in my layout.

 

There were moments when ONLY these operations I was allowed to make without crushing of my Quark.

 

Maybe these can help both users and Quark's techs.