Layout is behaving badly! Laggy and unresponsive

sally_p · May 21, 2020, 6:56pm

Hi,

Layout is misbehaving on my Mac Book Pro.
(Mid 2012, running Mojave 10.14.6 (18G4032) processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Graphics cards NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1 GB Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB)

It is very laggy, has strange lines on the screen which disappear if I zoom in, slow to select tools, generally very frustrating.

I should add that my MBP is very full, I need to do some file storage management, but it worked fine with SU19.

Attached dropbox link to video shows the issues, you don’t see the spinning wheel on the video but I can assure you it spins! A lot! Dropbox - File Deleted

Layout file also attached. Help!! test.layout (5.3 MB)

Best, Sally

DaveR · May 21, 2020, 7:08pm

Hi Sally! How are you doing? Long time no chat.

Is this LO file only supposed to have images and no SketchUp file?

The lines you were referring to in your video were a strange graphic issue that was supposed to have been fixed with 2020.

I’m not seeing any problems with moving images around on the page although my PC wasn’t thrilled about the .heic image. I converted it to .jpg and replaced it and that works fine, too.

I expect what you are seeing is that your graphics card can’t redraw the imageas quickly as it needs to. There were some performance improvements in 2020 that may give you better results. If you really are butting heads with your graphics card which is what it looks like, you might try setting display resolution to Low. As another way around the issue, you might try making very low res copies of the images to use for page setup. Once you have things arranged as you want, you can replace the low res images with the high res for export.

colin · May 21, 2020, 7:52pm

It is a demanding file. That single page is dealing with almost 32 million pixels. About the same as 16 HD monitors.

sally_p · May 21, 2020, 8:03pm

Hi Dave,

all good thanks, I thought it would be you on the case for me!

This is Layout 20, version 20.0.362. I haven’t tried converting the .HEICs to jpgs, but having said that even with screen shots or jpgs it is very unresponsive.

I wondered if it was anything to do with the graphics card, but it has worked absolutely fine previously, even with huge SU models.

I have tried the same file on my iMac, and whilst initially it responded faster, it then slowed down. I’l do some more testing tomorrow, change the photo file formats and see if it makes any difference.

Thanks for your help, as always. Hope you are OK and surviving lockdown? Are you guys locked down? Crazy times eh?

Best, Sally

sally_p · May 21, 2020, 8:13pm

Hi Colin, shows what I know eh?! In my mind it’s just 4 photos! I often use lots of images though, never had this problem before. I’ll swap them out with lower res pictures and see what happens. Best, regards, Sally

Anssi · May 21, 2020, 8:21pm

I think it becomes a bit more responsive when I set the Display Resolution to Low in Document Setup>Paper. The .HEIC image doesn’t display at all on my PC, and I don’t have any app that would open it. @DaveR, what did you use?

DaveR · May 21, 2020, 8:23pm

I opened it in PaintDOTnet. I’d never opened an heic file before so wasn’t aware that PaintDOTNet would handle it but it worked fine.

sally_p · May 21, 2020, 8:39pm

Hi Anssi, those files are how photos download directly from my iPhone X. If I put them into ‘photos’ on my Mac and then export them they turn into Jpgs. An Apple thing!

colin · May 21, 2020, 9:03pm

They will open in Preview too. That might be a quicker way to adjust their size and to make them be JPEG. The steps would be:

Right-click on an image, choose Open with Image Editor. It’s likely to use Preview.
In Preview use the Tools menu, Adjust Size. For these images you could set I to 25% and not notice any difference even on a 300dpi print.
Unfortunately, you can’t save in place, so save a JPEG version of the image somewhere.
In LayOut, File, Document Setup, References, choose the image you just changed and click the Relink button.
Point to the new JPEG.

The image on the page will remain the same size.

colin · May 21, 2020, 9:30pm

Try this version.

test.layout (815.1 KB)

sally_p · May 22, 2020, 5:47am

Thank you Colin, a lesson learned. A lot of my Layout files are much bigger but weren’t as laggy, so is it more about the number of pixels than the size of the file? Many thanks for the tutorial, very useful.

Kind regards, Sally

sally_p · May 22, 2020, 5:48am

Yes, that works. Thank you so much. I was losing the will to live!!

colin · May 22, 2020, 3:23pm

I tested that, and being Low didn’t make a noticeable difference, but setting LayOut to open in low resolution made a dramatic difference. Even the huge image file worked well enough.

Anssi · May 22, 2020, 4:39pm

That, I think, is a Mac thing

sally_p · May 22, 2020, 6:17pm

Hi Colin,

I found that option on the Layout app itself, but when I was looking for it I initially looked on the specific file info for that file. I have ‘stationery pad’ as an option. Do you know what this is?

Thanks for sorting this out for me, much appreciated. Sally

McGordon · May 22, 2020, 6:47pm

It’s an old and probably underused feature of OS X/macOS a bit like a template. If you make it a stationery pad, it will open as Untitled and you’ll have to save it as a new name.

Edit: it adds " copy" to the end of the file now, I’m sure it used to open as an Untitled document.

sally_p · May 23, 2020, 8:17am

Hello McGordon,

thank you, who knew?! Apart from you! I shall give it a try and see what happens. Does it offer anything that a personally created ‘my template’ doesn’t?

Best regards, Sally

McGordon · May 23, 2020, 9:33am

Everyone with a Mac knows? Well ok, probably not.

It doesn’t depend on the programmer writing template features, it works in almost any program that can open a file. The program doesn’t have to be open either, so you can set a file as stationery at any time from the Finder.

As SketchUp and Layout do have a built in template system, it’s not that much use for them. It can still be useful though if you have a file you don’t want to overwrite and want to try multiple versions of it. Each time you open it, you’ll be opening a copy. Or you might want a template just for one project without putting it in your main templates folder.

Stationery files used to open as Untitled before Apple brought in the versioning autosave stuff. I actually preferred that as you were forced to name it when you saved instead of it already having a name. So now if you open a stationery pad file called “My Template” and save it, it will be called something like “My Template Copy”.

I just looked it up and Autosave started with OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011, so it’s not that new. Stationery goes back to before OS X to at least System 7 from 1991, 29 years ago. I’ve only been using Macs for 20 years, so I was using Atari computers at that time.

sally_p · May 30, 2020, 1:26pm

Thanks McGordon, I’m quite new to Mac compared to you then, I’ve only been using them 19 years!! You can always learn eh?

colin · May 30, 2020, 4:35pm

Funny story, or two. My first use of a Mac OS was in October 1987, while visiting Apple Computer UK, doing an interview to try to work in Tech Support. The interview was informal, and went ok, so afterwards my potential future manager let me use a Mac to write up my CV.

I did get the job, largely because I was expert in Apple II, and the tech support guys knew more about Lisa and Macintosh (this predates the time when Apple paid a lot of money to have the rights to say “Mac”). But, I didn’t know Mac OS at all, and still had to take phone calls about Mac questions. One early on call went like this:

Apple Dealer: “What’s the current version of Finder?”
Me, to colleagues: “What’s the current version of Finder?”
Colleagues: “5.5”
Me to dealer: “5.5”
hang up…
Me to colleagues: “What’s Finder?”