Slow Display in FrameMaker

[Scott Suckling]

Had a document with very sluggish performance (dialog boxes were very slow to open and apply) similar to this post from the archive:

<<We sent our a translation vendor our FrameMaker files and illustrations for them to translate or text and return it translated. I copied all their files onto the same network drive and when I work with those files everything goes very quickly. (We cannot have our illustrations and FrameMaker files on same network to save disk space and accessability reasons).>>

Found a solution. When I compared the "sluggish" doc to a "speedy" one, the only difference was the number of color definitions. The sluggish had close to 1,000 and the speedy had less than 100. Rather than delete each color def one at a time, I opened a brand-new file and imported all formats (except the color definitions). This solved the problem.

[Sheila Carlisle]

Interesting solution, Scott -- thanks for posting. Do you have any idea where the extreme excess of color defs came from? I've seen them spontaneously transubstantiate from colors contained in referenced or included graphics files, and of course our favorite "evil" source, coming in from Word files.

Sheila

[thomas bro]

Nice solution Scott.

I've come across the same when using/importing Word files. They had WMF files embedded (originally from AutoCad). They contained all the definitons.

kee smiling
thomas

[Scott Suckling]

Not sure where they definitions came from. I drafted all the illustrations in Illustrator, so that's not a suspect.

I'm reusing a template the publisher supplied. I did a book with the same template 18 months ago and don't remember any problems. But this time around it was a different story. There is an outside chance they came from Word, but I doubt it--the author also used a standard, publisher-supplied Word template. (I would have seen the problem in other projects.)

A couple of system variables may have changed in the interim. Using MacOS 9.2.2 instead of 9.1, and have switched to an ATI Radeon 8500 card and LCD screen. (Perhaps the Radeon is the culprit).

Don't really know. Just thought I'd pass on the experience in case someone else had the problem.

[Niels Grundtvig Nielsen]

I gave up on using .png graphics when I realised they were bloating my FM files with colour definitions. Now I can comfortably blame the network for the time it takes to open a file ... but what aspect of my corporate NT box do I need to examine to find out why (for example) changing from a document to a book takes a measurable amount of time to redraw the toolbar? More details on request if anyone can point me in the right direction.