Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 36304
Text editing is annoyingly slow in long paragraphs
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:20:09 UTC
1. Open a new writer document. 2. Enter some arbitrary text of 4 pages or more, but as *one* paragraph. 3. Try to delete some text, by pressing and holding "Delete" or "Backspace" keys. 4. The closer the cursor to the beginning of the paragraph is, the longer the response time is. For instance, trying to delete the first line in the way described above took over 1 minute long, whereas trying to delete the last line took about 4 seconds. Disabling automatic spell/syntax checker (or even dictionaries) doesn't seem to have any effect. Apart from version 1.1.3 (Greek), I also had the chance to test some more versions of OpenOffice: 1.1.2 (Greek): Had the above behaviour. 1.1.0 (Greek): Had the above behaviour. 1.0.2 (Greek): Did not have the above behaviour! Although the average home user will almost never encounter such a case, there are some exceptions. For example, Greek lawyers are bound by law not to have paragraphs or empty lines in contracts they write and sign.
I created a paragraph 10 pages long, it works acceptable for me in ooo 1.9.58. There is a small delay (<0.5s) when deleting a character. I tried with justified, right and left alignments. please try it from http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html As it's quite stable, please use it by default and report bugs for it. After testing, please close this issue. Thanks!
Apologies for the late reply. OOo 1.9.58 takes some time to download using a 56K modem :-( So, I have tried it on my PC (PIII 450 MHz, 320 MB of RAM) and I'm afraid I can't really say that the delay is acceptable when it comes to intensive text editing. Characters at the very end of the paragraph are being deleted at a good speed by pressing and holding the Backspace/Delete key (or even by tapping it). However, the ones at the start (or even middle) are deleted in "slow motion". I'll also try to test it on faster PCs and I'll let you know of the result within the next couple of days.
MRU->SBA: I think there are already other issues about slow processing performance while entering larger paragraphs.
Seems still slow (single paragraph over 10 pages long. on a 2.4gHz p4). Deleting single character 20 times takes about 25 seconds. (MS Word takes <0.5 sec).
I had a slow rendering on win98, if "Pair kerning" was on (issue 28765). Please look, if it is on in your documents too.
regina, I have XP Pro on my PC, so I cannot reproduce the error. However, I checked the issue you referred to (28765) and the setting is disabled.
Problem persists after upgrading my PC (AMD Athlon 3000+,1 GB ram)
It takes about a second per character in a 15-page document on a P3/866, Debian, OOo 1.9.71.1. Searched for similarities but no real similar issues found, so confirming.
SBA:I compared OOo 1.1.4 with OOo 680m87 on SUSE 9.2 (Pentium IV, 1800MHz): A new document, insert dummy text and copy it 40 times (without creating a new paragraph) ...this makes approx. 14 pages, depending on the font. - Put cursor on top of page 1 - Hit "Del" 10 times quickly and wait... -> OOo 1.1.4: needs about 10 sec for each caracter => 2 minutes to finish ... :-( -> OOo 680m78 needs less than one second each, finishes after approx 10 seconds ... :-) => So there is a huge performance gain in the current version compared to OOo 1.1.4. SBA->FME: Nevertheless, it looks as if the entire rest of the paragraph is being re-calculated for every edit action (wich is hard to accept by the user for all the pages that are far out of sight). Given the fact that average 15-page-documents documents have slightly more than one paragraph, I set the Prio to P4 and the target to "OOo later". Reassigned to FME.
SBA: Small typo: ...compared OOo 1.1.4 with OOo 680m78...
*** Issue 68109 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Using OOo 2.0.3 under Windows XP, I tried a 10 pages paragraph and could not notice a difference in speed as described here. => Works for me.
Still confirmed on OOo 2.4.0. It is true that with a recent and fast processor and a good amount of memory it doesn't seems like a real problem, but one can still notice that when you edit the paragraph the processor get's a high use rate. But such a document could make impossible to work with on older machines, and it get worst if they are short on RAM memory. A collaborator on the spanish native-lang community send me a document of nearly 50 pages and only one paragraph. It was a legal contract and as such, it must be wrote that way, and she reported that on some machines OOo 2.4 seemed to hang up when editing it.
fme->sbosio: I'm curious: Is there a some rule that legal documents have to be written in a single paragraph? This makes is impossible to use styles and numberings and so on. It's hard to believe.
@ fme: It is not just a "rule", but a law! This is the case in Greece and it seems that the same holds in Spain, according to what sbosio said. In some cases that come to mind, the solicitor/lawyer gets paid according to the legal document's number of pages, hence they must comply to a "template", that even specifies the number of lines a page may have. The "template" is rather primitive, possibly because they assume that some may still use typewriters :-)
sbosio->fme: It seems to be so, I'm not a lawyer, nor I work on a legal buffet, but you can find some comments on the need for long paragraphs on issue 17171 (http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=17171), related to the impossibility of Writer to cope with paragraphs of more than 65534 chars. Also, issue 85570 (http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=85570) seems to be a duplicate of this one. See my comments there.
Björn, please take over
pls. reassign or close issues. Thx.
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".