How do i quickly get to the end of a writer document when only the first part loads

[GColl]

Hi,

I have just updated to lo 25.8.1.1 x86 64 on my win10 laptop.
I have just loaded a longish document (nearly 300 pages so far) in writer and noticed something rather strange and veryinconvenient that i have never noticed before. Only the start of the document loaded which meant i could not use the window scrollbar to get to the end of the document. At first i thought something had gone wrong and i had lost a lot from the end of the document but then i found that the document is ok but it was loading a bit at a time and i had to use the mouse scroll wheel to get to the bottom. Keeping an eye on the status bar i found that the page count was changing ie in ‘page X of Y’ Y was increasing as i used the scroll wheel. It took quite a long time to wheel down to the end of the document. Is there a way to quickly get to the bottom of a document in a case like this?
I dont know if this is relevant but i recently migrated all my documents from my main drive to a usb flash.
Also i dont know if it will happen again but it took me so long to get to the end of the document that i’m not at all inclined to try!

[ajlittoz]

What are the technical properties of your document?

First of all, save format: .odt of .doc(x)?

How is it formatted? Direct formatting is far less efficient than pure styling. Users coming from Word tend to ignore character styles because they don’t exist under Word. Character styles are used for bold, italics, changes in font and size, … But adopting character styles requires saving as .odt otherwise the conversion to .docx wipes them out.

Have you “monster tables”? Tables become “monster tables” when cells span several pages. One occurrence is no problem, but repetition puts a considerable strain on Writer.

Are there many images?

[EarnestAl]

@GColl

I dont know if this is relevant but i recently migrated all my documents from my main drive to a usb flash.

Not directly related to the question but you should know that most USB drives are not as robust or reliable as hard drives. I do hope you have a backup strategy, see Preventing data disaster - The Document Foundation Wiki

[Bayberry]

Total tangent here, but Word definitely has character styles. I tried looking up the point at which it started using styles, and based on this source it is from the beginning:

https://mendelson.org/wordstyles.html

So that you don’t have to go there:

From the start, Word conceived of a document as a form that contained other forms: divisions (called sections in later versions of Word), paragraphs, and characters, all governed by styles.

In the subsequent paragraph, it links to a user manual for Word 1.0; the instructions for creating and using styles starts at p. 161 (PDF page 205).

[Wanderer]

@GColl

page count was changing ie in ‘page X of Y’ Y was increasing as i used the scroll wheel. It took quite a long time to wheel down to the end of the document. Is there a way to quickly get to the bottom of a document in a case like this?

One of the “yes and no situation”. I see this sometimes for my database-reports, wich can be quite long tables with a lot of puctures.
.
I use keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+End) to jump to the end. But in my experience I have to wait until Writer has finished rendering the table until the end to have a “stable” experience.
So the only way forbmore speed would be better hardware in my case. (Or using something like TeX and therefore not having a WYSIWIG-sytlstem.)

[ajlittoz]

@Wanderer

quite long tables with a lot of pictures

This is a typical case where you must carefully design your table structure. And if it comes from Base report generator, this is where you must exercise caution.

Writer does not like cells spanning several pages. From my experiments, it looks like Writer collects all data related to the current row (all columns) before starting rendering. Apparently, this is necessary to compute where page breaks will occur.

I got dramatic improvements when I split huge cells into smaller rows (where this makes sense, of course), aiming at eliminating cross-page cells. A medium-sized cell spanning a single page break does little harm. But as soon as cell contents spans several pages, you’re in trouble.

Regarding images, my usual advice is to prepare pictures beforehand so that Writer just renders them without extra job (like trimming, scaling, cropping, …).

[Wanderer]

@ajlittoz

And if it comes from Base report generator, this is where you must exercise caution.

… and that’s quit difficult, because the report-generator is a black box. Maybe I will create a separate topic/question on this. But I avoid using the report generator as much as possible. (The reports work, but using the editor is a daunting task.)

[koyotak]

@GColl

relevant but i recently migrated all my documents from my main drive to a usb flash

From a distance, this could well be due to the fact that the file is being written to or read from an external storage device via the slow USB interface instead of the much faster interface of internal storage.
Another aspect: While the processor is familiar with the folder structures of the internal storage (volatile RAM and non-volatile hard drive), it has to learn the structure of each newly connected external storage device.