iMac 2019, i9, 16Gb
Highlighting in a PDF produces a brief halt / beachball.
- Select text
- Highlight using keystroke
- scroll down, it halts for a second
- beachball, another second or two
It’s a brief halt but not what you’d expect.
How large is the document (bytes/pages)?
A book. Several hundred pages. No images.
That explains it, unfortunately due to limitations of macOS’ PDFkit framework. One workaround might be to split the book (e.g. into chapters).
I’m not complaining – but just want to mention that this happens very frequently with my DBs, and whereas some PDFs are large, most are “standard” journal articles.
Also happens when I for instance select a Word file, and a preview needs to be generated.
I figured I would pop up the above, since it was instantly noticeable compared to what my experience was with DTPO2 (I am accessing the same DBs in DT3) – so not sure it is necessarily related to my documentation, since DTPO2 handled them fine.
I didn’t mention it, since DT3 is a Beta, but just want to make the point that my experience is that it is not necessarily a PDFkit framework issue.
I start to use real data for testing for a database with an index group of approx 1,000 files (of which 800 of them are pdf).
It seems that the spinning beachball occurs more in 3.0 than in 2.n for pdf access in general, not just highlight and sometimes for just moving up and down the list.
Another example: I use one window for searching in an index group and another window for moving file/s from global inbox into the index group. The spinning beachball appears when I update the search (hit enter in search field) if/when the newly added/moved file/s is/are also a hit.
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I would echo this as being my experience as well.
I’m also having issues with this in DT3b3 - the app will beachball for as long as 15-20 seconds. Now, I am admittedly working with unreasonably large PDFs from Google Books and elsewhere (from 60-150 MB), but the total unresponsiveness after highlighting an indexed PDF is a bit disconcerting.
I am admittedly working with unreasonably large PDFs
Again, DEVONthink 3 is in beta-testing. It is not the public release and there are obviously fixes and optimizations to come. Intentional stress testing is good, but I wouldn’t see anything as disconcerting at this point.
I absolutely understand re: the beta status. I used “disconcerting” inasmuch as the app is consistently quite fluid and responsive, so it’s both unexpected, and also not clear if the long beach balls herald a crash (which I don’t think it ever has). I’m not worried about losing anything if DT3b3 does crash.
Did you file a support ticket on this?
If not, when the application is stalled, do a Spotlight search for Activity Monitor. Select our application in the list of processes - it should show “(Not Responding)” and the name in red - and press Command-Option-S to run a sample on it. When the sample window opens, press the Save button and save it to your Desktop. Please attach this text file to your Support Ticket so we can inspect it. Thanks!