Heavy to load illustrated novel

Issues with installing under all versions of MS Windows
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Timeship
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Heavy to load illustrated novel

Post by Timeship »

Hi, everyone! I write illustrated books for teens, but I have a rather big problem with OO4. It can barely handle a 300-page 6x9 book with 50 monochrome illustrations (300dpi). It takes 5min to open and 5min to save automatically every 10min, which slows my productivity to 50%. Originally, it inserts them all as color, so that makes it even worse, until I save them manually one-by-one as monochrome. That eases the software, so it runs a bit faster, but still, it barely breathes, and I work with the speed of a turtle.

Do you have any tips-and-tricks or private lifelong discoveries down your sleeves? Any homemade "hacks" perhaps, to make this freeware operate faster? Or is it NOT made for desktop publishing illustrated books, graphic novels, and magazines, only office documents, plain novels, and eBooks with one lo-res cover?

P.S. I have the same problem with LibreOffice, FreeOffice, and other freeware, which are even slower and can't even recognize certain fonts or smart punctuation, etc. Only MS Word 2000 handles my illustrated books easily, though recently the new Win10 update doesn't like its own old software and crashes it (almost like deliberately) without even saving my work, as if the new Microsoft is fighting itself. That's why I started looking for alternatives.

Thanks!
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RoryOF
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by RoryOF »

In /Tools /Options /OpenOffice Writer /View one can turn off the display of Graphics and objects, Drawings; this I think leaves a placeholder of the size, but should speed things up.

It might be that you would need a dedicated program such as InDesign. Another thing you might do is Save your file on an SSD, which should speed up the process.

How much RAM (memory) on your computer?
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by John_Ha »

300 pages with 50 illustrations is trivial and should be faster.
 Edit: I did a quick test.

335 6" x 9" pages with 104,000 words and 52 24-bit colour images (most about 1.5MB JPG) for a .odt file of 68 MB opens in about 8 seconds and saves in about 15 seconds. 2 x 3GHz, 7GB, SSD disk. 
1. Are your images embedded (fast) or linked (potentially very slow if from the web)? See [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for an explanation and for how to convert linked images to embedded.

2. Are you using lots of footnotes or endnotes? See Items 11 and 11A in [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for an explanation.

3. Do this test: Tools > Options > Writer > View. Untick Graphics and Objects. Does it now load faster?

4. The file may be "tangled". Do this test: Create a new, empty document. Insert > File ..., and insert your file. Save. Is the saved file faster?

5. Poor choice of image anchors can cause problems. Does the page count vary a lot? and is it often much higher than the correct value? See Items 11 and 11A in [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for an explanation of this effect.

6. How big are your images - phone images can be gigantic. See [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for how to optimise image pixel counts and file sizes.

7. Are you saving as a .odt file - you should be. How big is the .odt file?

8. If you upload the file to a file share site someone will analyse it for you. If the file has confidential material in it, you can obscure the contents without affecting the structure too much (lines will spill differently because different characters have different widths) by changing every lower case alphabetic character to an " x ". Select all the text (Ctrl+A) and:

Edit > Find and Replace
Find box [a-z]
Replace box x
Options: Match case: YES, Regular expressions: YES
click Replace all

Repeat the above using [A-Z] and X to scramble the upper case letters, and [0-9] and 0 to scramble numeric data.

9. Carefully read 16. Lost images ... and a word of caution about using AutoRecovery. LibreOffice 6.1 and later is now probably better than AOO in [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for a discussion on lost images in AOO.
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Timeship
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by Timeship »

RoryOF wrote:In /Tools /Options /OpenOffice Writer /View one can turn off the display of Graphics and objects, Drawings; this I think leaves a placeholder of the size, but should speed things up.

It might be that you would need a dedicated program such as InDesign. Another thing you might do is Save your file on an SSD, which should speed up the process.

How much RAM (memory) on your computer?
PC, Win 10+, 8GB Ram, 2TB HDD, all illustrations are mine, pencils, each no more than 2mb, PNG, see them at https://www.flickr.com/photos/spaceart/ - I'm doing this for ages. THX
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Timeship
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by Timeship »

All my images are plain pencils, saved as PNG to preserve gray-scaling (most under 1mb,some 1.5mb). I tried basic JPG, but the files are bigger (2-4mb each) and the situation is the same. See my artwork at http://www.flickr.com/photos/spaceart/ - Averagely, a 400-page illustrated book is under 300mb DOC. My old MS Office 2000 opens and saves them in 10sec and handles them no problem, incl. the hi-res color book covers (10mb). All my books are made with 2K since year 2000, so I never used MS Publisher or in-Design, which are far more complicated to me. Office 2K is made like for school kids, and it worked fine just until recently, so now I'm looking for an alternative. If OO4 can't handle illustrated books, that's OK. I'll go back to 2K. Crashing or no crashing, I can't quit my job. Thanks, everyone!
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robleyd
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by robleyd »

The images seem to be much larger than is needed for the size you would be displaying in a book? Have you tried resizing the images to the needed size for the book, and reducing the resolution, before inserting them in the document, per Section 3 of the tutorial John_Ha linked above?
Cheers
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by John_Ha »

Timeship wrote:If OO4 can't handle illustrated books, that's OK.
AOO can easily handle books of that type and size and much larger.
John_Ha wrote: 335 6" x 9" pages with 104,000 words and 52 24-bit colour images (most about 1.5MB JPG) for a .odt file of 68 MB opens in about 8 seconds and saves in about 15 seconds. 2 x 3GHz, 7GB, SSD disk.
Did you bother to read what I posted? If you are not getting that performance then you have something wrong.

And, by the way, a .doc is 3x slower than a .odt file.

But you seem determined just to moan about things so as to confirm your incorrect prejudice without really wanting an answer or taking notice of what is suggested.
Last edited by John_Ha on Mon Jul 05, 2021 5:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Timeship
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by Timeship »

robleyd wrote:The images seem to be much larger than is needed for the size you would be displaying in a book? Have you tried resizing the images to the needed size for the book, and reducing the resolution, before inserting them in the document, per Section 3 of the tutorial John_Ha linked above?
That's NOT the problem, though. All DTP (Desktop Publishing) software can handle (crop/resize/refit/rescale) whatever size images provided, just as MS Word does it for 30 years. The illustrations were originally drawn for 6x9 books, and then used for various other formats, resized within their formats, as it is done all over the world. I can't resize them in Photoshop for each different book format because they will come out of their original frames (see samples here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/spaceart). I only paste them (i.e., zoom out to "fit in" the page at 50% or so), which even makes them look better--more detailed! That's why all publishers, not just me, resize or rather refit all illustrations within the various book format. Trust me, I've been doing this since the 1980s, when we started on Commodore 64 and MS Word was still in diapers ;-)

Thanks for the reply, though.

Creers!
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Zizi64
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by Zizi64 »

All my images are plain pencils, saved as PNG to preserve gray-scaling (most under 1mb,some 1.5mb)
The size is true for the the compressed, packed files. But the LibreOffice MUST uncompress, unpack the files to show the content.

And the uncompressed file will consupt much more memory. And 50 pieces of uncompressed files will consupt 50 times more.


Please optimize your images before you insert them into your document. Optimize them for the actual size. The 300 dpi is a good resolution value, but when the original physical size is too big, the number of the pixels will be a huge numeric value. Optimize the pixel number to the actual (resized) physical size.
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by Mountaineer »

I don't think you will solve your problem with AOO.
You should
  • Double your RAM (the DTP systems all over the world likes this)
  • Create a virtual machine with last Win7 (no further updates)=no updates=hope to run forever
  • Put your favorite Word2k inside
I assume you never converted or rebuild your documents with AOO as it is possible to open and save .doc.
But this means AOO would not only open your file but translate from and to another world on every open/save.
Takes time, and may produce problems over time as StarOffice was never a clone of Microsofts, but has a different principle (styles) deep inside.

If you keep the pictures outside the document you could easily use downsized thumbs during production and exchange with 300dpi before print. Professional PDF-Software can even do this after generation of the PDF. But as you said DTP is complicated and (you didn't mention) expensive.

I recognize some of your problems, as I often handle documents generated by databases with up to 300 picture in tables, but YOU should search a way to stay with your beloved software made for school kids as you wrote (I guess MS would loved this quotation in year 2000)

J

PS: For other readers here my suggestion would be to try LibreOffice AND start fresh, without loading old .doc.
If necessary copy text/pictures, but not formatting.

You can try to use Master documents and chapters to keep single files smaller....

PPS: As my companies contractors use InDesign: The problems with Images, to many references etc remain even in the more professional/expensive world. But there is always hope.
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RoryOF
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel

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I note that on one of my computers (used for daily work) OpenOffice can get very slow as page count increases - I note this on a sample file of 1900 A5 pages, plain text (550,000 words, War and Peace, if it matters!). This particular machine is Acer M1930, with i3-2100 running up to 3100 MHz, 8 GB RAM; Sandy bridge Rev 7, the delay seems to arise from repagination - what little investigation I have made suggests it is some problem with memory handling, and control returns after a time (minutes). For normal work - files of about 200-300K words, formatted text, this machine is quite adequate and I'm too lazy to change to the faster (next paragraph)..

I can put the same file in another computer (i7-3100, 16 GB RAM) and I do not have the same delay.

I have monitored memory usage, and OO seems only to be using a maximum of about 550MB RAM, and engaging one core (from low load to 100%). I suspect it is (in my case) a motherboard design problem, perhaps to do with the support chips. It does not appear to be a swap file problem - monitoring indicates no swap file in use. Equally, it does not appear to be a shortage of RAM, although, if I find some suitable RAM I'll increase to 16GB (suitable means free or in need of a good home at reasonable cost!), though perhaps the cash might be better applied to finding a new computer.

It might be worth the OP's trying a dedicated publishing app, such as Scribus.

Motherboard model (or computer make/model) of the computer involved would be of interest.
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RoryOF
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel

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Experimented with a sample file incorporating 550,000 words and 18 large illustrations embedded (mostly about 8 MB) on three other computers of varying ages and speeds. No problems - load time for file 70MB is about 5 secs.
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel

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RoryOF wrote:load time for file 70MB is about 5 secs.
Your PC must be more modern than mine :crazy:

Mine is 10 years old and it takes me 8 seconds - but I did have 52 x 6 million pixel colour images to load.

There are so many things the OP could do to improve things but I don't think they want help to fix it - they just want to rant and vent their spleen. It seems very similar to Numbering text keeps shifting and Angry complaint about *intelligent* search feature - lots of "telling" and very little "listening".
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel. HELP!

Post by John_Ha »

Mountaineer wrote:I assume you never converted or rebuild your documents with AOO as it is possible to open and save .doc.
But this means AOO would not only open your file but translate from and to another world on every open/save.
Takes time, and may produce problems ...
Which is precisely why I suggested the OP saved as .odt but my suggestion was completely ignored.
John_Ha wrote:7. Are you saving as a .odt file - you should be. How big is the .odt file?
.doc files are handled differently from .odt documents because .doc files are essentially a memory dump whereas .odt files are separate text and individual image components. In a .doc file \WordDocument is just a memory dump of the entire document including images so, when opening the file, AOO has to read it all into memory, extract the images and write each image to ...\temp, something not necessary with a .odt file. This takes time ... but is not the reason for the OP's problems. It is trivial to speed the OP by a factor of 10x but that still does not address the underlying cause.
.doc file with 52 photo images
.doc file with 52 photo images
The OP's understanding of PNG compared with JPG leaves a lot to be desired and suitable optimisation could give at least a 3x speed up.

But I don't think the OP wants a solution - (s)he just wants to complain about AOO and (s)he will not entertain the thought (s)he is doing things incorrectly.
.
 Edit: I think the OP's problems are caused because (s)he is saving as a .doc file.
Averagely, a 400-page illustrated book is under 300mb DOC
I think this means an average book is 400 pages stored in a .doc file which is 300MBytes

In a .doc file, all the images are mixed up with the text in one single file called WordDocument. This entire file - 300MBytes in this case - has to be loaded into memory before anything can be done.

In a .odt file the text and the images are kept separate - text goes into content.xml and images go into \Pictures. Only the text and placeholders have to be loaded before the file can be used. Images will continue to be loaded in the background but will not prevent the file being used.

A large .doc file with many images will therefore load much more slowly than the identical document stored as a .odt file.  
Last edited by John_Ha on Fri Dec 02, 2022 10:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Heavy to load illustrated novel

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Having saved my trial file as .doc, it takes about 60 seconds to load, instead of the 7 seconds of the same file as an .odt.
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