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jamesasa
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InCopy slowness - Import Snippet

Jul 7, 2009 8:33 AM

Hi all,

 

Why is InCopy so slow at opening flies?

 

No matter whether we work over the server, or completely locally when testing between InDesign and InCopy on my Mac; Opening InCopy Assignments is incredibly slow.- so it's nothing to do with network speed.

 

When opening an InCopy Assignment in InCopy, the progress bar seems to go smoothly until it gets up to the "Import snippet" bit of the process, it then stalls there for ages, before finally opening the file. Sometimes it can take up to 15 minutes to open 1 assignment (sometimes more but we usually force quit the application before it gets to that).

 

Could somebody shed some light on the "Import Snippet" part of the import/open process? Maybe the slowness i'm experiencing is something to do with my extensive use of Paragraph and Character styles in my InDesign documents?

 

I am not using any sort of linked Word Documents, Excel files etc. All my images in these test files are low res JPEG's. I do have a couple of Vector graphics copied and pasted from Illustrator in there, though i've tried deleting them and mit makes no difference. The fonts i'm using are Calibri and Cambria.

 

I'm using both Mac and PC with OS X 10.5.7 and Windows XP respectively. Both use InCopy and InDesign 6.0.3. I'm running an 8 core G5 with 4GB of RAM in my tests.

 

Thanks,

James

1058 Views   3 Replies   Latest reply: jamesasa, Jul 7, 2009 12:42 PM
 
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  • AnneMarie Concepcion
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    1. AnneMarie Concepcion,
    Jul 7, 2009 9:23 AM   in reply to jamesasa
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    Wow ... frustrating!

     

    FWIW though, your question should be "Why is InCopy so slow at opening OUR files?" ... because 15 minutes to open an assignment (esp a local assignment) is NOT the norm. It should be more like 10-15 seconds to a minute-ish (for the largest files) at the most, over the average network.

     

    I don't know what the "snippet" part is, I suspect it's part of the sausage being made that we don't need to see.

     

    My guess is that you have a very complicated layout (hundreds of stories? text wraps?.). I'm wondering what happens if you create an assignment that is only one spread long with a couple stories. Same problem?

     

    By "extensive" use of styles, how extensive are we talking? More than a couple hundred styles?

     

    What happens if you have InCopy open the layout (indd) file instead of the assignment? Any diff?

     

    Was the layout created in ID CS4, or was it converted from an earlier version?

     

    Where are you storing the linked InCopy stories? What format are you exporting them to ... ICML or INCX?

     

    AM

     
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  • jamesasa
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    2. jamesasa,
    Jul 7, 2009 12:10 PM   in reply to AnneMarie Concepcion
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    Hi AM, thank you for joining in the discussion - i've watched many of your videos on Lynda.com, they're wonderully put together.

     

    First of all you are right, it should have been "our files". Normally when i create an InDesign document, like a newsletter with several pages, InCopy opens the assignments in about 15 seconds. It works perfect. However with one of the Magazines that i produce, i experience this "Import Snippet" problem; the slowness.

     

    Bugs and glitches aside, InCopy is the best thing since sliced bread! It saves us so much time!

     

    Typically within the problem file; a story will span no more than two pages, and those 2 pages will form a single spread (2 facing pages). Generally my assignments are split up as "per story", so they either consist of 1 or 2 pages per assignment. I find this to be a neat and tidy way to break up the assignments for our editors.

     

    Everything is done in CS4 - no legacy files anywhere.

     

    There may well be around 100 paragraph styles in this document, maybe that's the problem?

     

    The linked InCopy stories are all stored as .icml files, in a folder called "Content" that sits beside the InCopy Assignment files.

     

    I have not tried opening just the InDesign file in InCopy yet, i will try that.

     

    Something that just came up as i was posting this message... i just relinked some broken links for some .icml files within InDesign, after i relinked them a progress bar came up in InDesign saying "Import snippet" - are the snippets really just the .imcl files?

     

    James

     
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  • jamesasa
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    3. jamesasa,
    Jul 7, 2009 12:42 PM   in reply to AnneMarie Concepcion
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    Update: I just tried opening the Indesign file in InCopy and it opened in approx. one second! Not really a solution but we're narrowing the problem down i suppose.

     
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