Slow NOTES Issues and Ideas

RootsMagic
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RootsMagic 8 SLOW NOTES Issues

THE PROBLEM:

If I am in a blank Notes section of an ancestor (or one with very few notes), typing text or pasting text works fine.*

However, if you are in a Notes section where you already have a lot of notes, entering text is extremely (unforgivably) slow.

For example, for my grandfather I have 2,200 words, about 13,000 characters (including a biography, obituary, birth, burial and death information, etc.). If I type in the sentence “My grandfather was a great old guy,” it does not show up on the RM8 screen for over 12 seconds!

If I type something similar in my mother’s notes, where I have about 5,000 words (30,000 characters), nothing shows on the screen for about 16 seconds.

*In other words, if I add text to a blank Notes screen I can see what I am typing in real time. However, if I am using a record where I have a lot of data already, I am typing blind, and making typos that I don’t notice until several seconds later. Fixing the typos, or deleting a line of text, is equally slow.

(This never happened in RM7.)

POSSIBLE REASON:

A new feature with RM8 is that 1) web URL links are ‘hot,’ or linkable from within the Notes space; and 2) if we publish a page (or a hundred pages), we can now use Word, etc. So, I am guessing that RM8 is using higher level text features than RM7 did, and that this uses a lot of memory, and thus slows down the process of using a heavily loaded Notes area.

IMPORTANCE:

Having names, birth and death dates, and linking relations together is fine, but collecting personal information and stories about my ancestors, and thus making them ‘come alive,’ is why I really do genealogy. And that’s where I use Notes. (I also add my paper and online sources to Notes.)

SOLUTIONS:

I hope that the RootsMagic folks can fix this problem, or add a solution, like being able to temporarily turn off the ‘higher level’ text features, and allow us to use plain text (similar to RM7) until we are ready to print / publish something.

OTHER IDEAS?

5 Likes
2

Thanks for bringing this up. I also have this problem, but didn’t realize it until I checked the Notes section of the right person.

3

I can reproduce this problem. I don’t have a clue what’s causing it. The developers will have to take a look.

4

Do all the notes have to be in the same single note? Or could they be split into notes alongside each fact type?

5

Each fact can have it’s own note. If you have a single note that includes information about birth and death, you enter your birth part of the note into the note for the birth fact and the death part of your note into the note for the death fact.

Each fact can only have one note, but such notes can essentially be as long as you wish for them to be.

6

I sometimes have problems with word wrap not working properly when pasting text. Sometimes some words don’t show up until I exit and go back to the notes. I think the errors accure when there is formatting attached to the text (eg bold).

7

Instead of the usual right-click/paste or Ctrl-V or using RM’s menu option paste (overlapping pages icon)

  • try using the 3-dots menu top right/Paste as plain text.
1 Like
8

This is why I have always drafted research essays and whatnot that are destined to become notes in RM (and online) in Notepad instead of in Word or some other program that uses formatting codes. (Unless it’s just a sentence or two, I almost never type them directly into the Notes box in RM.) It’s much easier to deal with if the document is plain text to begin with. And I save all those text files as separate documents on my computer anyway, since they’re often quite lengthy and will be emailed to other researchers and posted elsewhere.

3 Likes
9

Do you convert to pdf?

10

Finally resolved with RM9. Yay!