Pages 6.0 hesitates while editing

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Level 1

40 points

Pages 6.0 hesitates while editing

I have recently installed OS X Sierra and Pages 6.0. I am trying to edit a document that was captured with OCR and so it needs a lot of detailed minor edits. Pages keeps stopping and spinning the beach ball for 1 or 2 seconds, literally every 5 or 10 seconds. This makes efficient editing, impossible.

I expect this may be related to the new simultaneous editing feature, and if this is true, how do I turn it off so I can get some work done? If it's due to some other problem, how do I go back to the previous version of Pages?

I like Apple. I'm an Apple advocate. But this is another sorry example of providing an upgrade with great new features that makes rather important features, like editing a document, nearly useless. I am running my computer with the same apps running and the same level of activity as I was doing two days ago. The activity monitor shows not excessive CPU usage, no memory overload, no network traffic—there's nobody I could possibly be syncing with.

Thanks for any help.

MacBook, macOS Sierra (10.12), 8 Gb Ram

Posted on Oct 19, 2016 3:25 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 20, 2016 9:58 AM in response to mdm13

Turn off spell checking.

Pages 5 and especially Pages 6 are both dogs.

Care to enlighten us what "great new features" you are talking about.

For most of us the tiny few improvements are swamped by the missing 100+ and the terrible, slow UI.

Peter

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Answer 2

mdm13 Author

Level 1

40 points

Oct 20, 2016 10:28 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

Your answer was the one I was afraid of. Pages 6 seems definitely slower than 5, and the going away for a second or two after almost every edit is definitely new behavior for me at least. Looks like it's back to Windows '09 for patching up the OTC documents.

I still have my copy of Pages '09 which I still use for large, complex documents, and it does seem to work on Sierra. I agree that many useful features appear to have been abandoned, never to make their way back into Pages. The "great new features" was intended sarcastically. The instant syncing between devices is of little interest to me, even though I have someone I collaborate with regularly on articles and longer documents, and she and I both have Macs. Unless we were sitting in the same room, I can't imagine editing the same document at the same time, and even then I can't imagine why we would want to. Sounds cool. Looks cool at the Apple Store. But, really? Is that worth giving up internal bookmarks and cross-referencing within a document? I guess I am getting old.

To be fair, part of my career was spent in marketing, and I understand the need to stay with the market. There was a time when Macintosh was the only reasonable option for desktop publishing, but the world is now mobile and to create the illusion of the same features across laptops, tablets, and phones, functionality is going to be driven by the least common denominator, i.e. what you can do easily with your finger on a small screen. We Macintosh users are now the tail on the dog, the latest tech dinosaurs. Doesn't matter really, because the alternative is still much worse. I've heard that if you go to **** when you die, the first thing they do is issue you a Windows laptop.

Sigh.

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Answer 3

mdm13 Author

Level 1

40 points

Oct 20, 2016 11:04 AM in response to mdm13

After doing some experimenting, I discovered that the spinning beach ball/hesitation during editing problem seems to be tied to how long, or more correctly, how many edits I've made since the last Save. Since I am doing many small edits in cleaning up a large OCR document, the number of edits adds up quickly, and after a certain point (I didn't count or measure) the delay in incorporating an edit jumps to 1 or 2 seconds. Saving the document clears the problem until the magic limit is reached again.

So CMD-S at regular intervals seems to "fix" the problem.

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