Help! Embedding item shapes into sentence slows Quark to a crawl...

[proxop]

In this Quark doc I have a list with icons to correspond to each list item. Icons consist of grouped picture and text boxes, and are embedded into the list text. My list takes up a letter size page. It is impossible to work with because Quark stalls to a crawl with every click of a mouse. Apparently Quark cannot handle too many embedded shapes. Does anyone know how to remedy this.

proxop

 

[MyFavoriteLetterIsB]

You could always set Quark to Greek the pictures in the general preferences.

B

 

[proxop]

That's a very good idea. I tried it, it didn't work. Perhaps because I'm using text in text boxes grouped with picture boxes as symbols. Greeking images didn't affect the redraw speed of the document. Thanks for your hint, though.

proxop

 

[sharkboots]

Are you merging Quark boxes, or using bezier boxes of some sort? Quark seems to struggle with these more than any other thing. If it is possible to achieve the same effect using simple (rectangular) boxes then I suggest you try it.

 

[proxop]

Most of my shapes are rectangulars and circles.

For experiment sake, I created a new Quark document and made a 0.075x0.075 text box with a coloured background. Then I created a page-wide and page-long text box and pasted a little squared box into it over and over again until the large text box was nearly full. At some point Quark's redraw begins to slow down dramatically and it almost stalls. The same happened when I tried pasting numerous picture boxes into a text box. Does anyone know why?

 

[sharkboots]

Quark places demands on your computers memory and CPU. When you have so many items on the page, Quark is asking your system to 'remember' and draw all those things. It is like asking your computer to play the very lastest computer game, full of flashy effects - sooner or later you reach the limit of your machines abilities. It seems to me that the way Quark handles embedded boxes is not particularly efficient, and that this places more strain on your system.