There’s a 2020 specific LayOut issue that can give a symptom that looks like LayOut has frozen. The other symptoms show that it’s not frozen, but sometimes you don’t see the other clues. Here’s the general case:
•After some amount of time, changes you are making on the page, or attempts to select things, stop working.
•If you have the Pages panel expanded you will notice that the thumbnail is actually updating, but the actual page isn’t.
•Resizing the window, or doing the slightest zoom in or out, will make the page update, to show all of your changes. But, the problem will continue to happen.
•Closing and reopening the document will give you a fresh start. No need to close LayOut itself.
A fix for the real problem is being worked on, but after several screen share sessions, and reports back from customers who tried a settings change, means there is a practical work around for now.
What led to figuring out the work around was that the most affected users were using a Magic Mouse on a Mac. That has an inertia setting, which will send a lot more mouse wheel requests than the user is actually doing. Turning off the inertia option changed one customer’s situation from going wrong in under a minute, to not going wrong all day.
On a normal USB mouse the problem is less likely to happen, unless it too has inertia options. For a simple mouse that has no inertia, setting the scroll speed to the fastest will make the problem happen soon, and setting it to the slowest will stop the problem from happening.
So, if you are here because you have seen these issues, look to see if your mouse has an inertia option, and disable that, and if not, set the scroll speed to a lower value.
For Mac, the Magic Mouse inertia is set in the Mouse or Pointer Control part of the Accessibility section in System Preferences.
