[daisy] Problem with long documents with tables in v1.3

[Bruno Dumon]

On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 19:38 +0200, Paul Focke wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 12:38 -0400, Thomas.Connally at dds.net wrote:
> > 
> > Hi, 
> > 
> > We're having a problem with a long document containing lots of tables.
> > When I make a PDF of the doc, it is about 47 pages. 
> > 
> > Almost all the content of the document are tables (two columns, lots
> > of rows, nothing fancy). 
> > 
> > The problem that's occurring is that making a change in the document,
> > and then saving, takes a very long time (more than two minutes).
> > Sometimes it just crashes the browser, without saving the changes
> > (lost work for the writer). However, when it crashes the browser and
> > another user tries to edit the doc, it says there is still a lock on
> > the document. 

There was a bug at the time with documents containing big tables, which
explains the long waiting when saving:
http://lists.cocoondev.org/pipermail/daisy/2006-January/002980.html

This was a server-side problem though, it usually shouldn't result in a
hanging browser, though that might depend on the browser being used.

> > 
> > Is Daisy incapable of handling long documents containing tables? 

In general I wouldn't suggest putting so much data in one document. I
imagine this is not only a problem for editing, but that it's also not
practical to view such a big document.

There are features like document includes and book publishing which
allow to create big documents out of many smaller ones, which might be
interesting to look at.

This being said, we should of course strive to make somewhat bigger
documents still workable.

> > 
> >  I would be sad to hear this, as we have been using Daisy with no
> > problems so far, but this would really be a drag if it can't handle
> > long documents with tables, as we have lots of documents we need to
> > add like this. 
> > 
> > Also, is this a problem that others have experienced, and has it been
> > addressed in more recent versions? 
> > 
> > We are using version 1.3 at this time, and are planning to upgrade to
> > 2.0. But if this is still a problem, I may reconsider the upgrade. 

I'd recommend to upgrade, regardless of whether it is still a problem,
since the causes of the problems would likely be different due to the
many changes that happened. If you report problems with the current
Daisy version, we're usually quick to look into them.

For example, the problem that Paul is mentioning is due to new code in
Daisy 2, and is Firefox specific. Now that we know this problem exists,
we could consider looking at it, but it might not even be a problem for
your case since he tested with a four times bigger table.

-- 
Bruno Dumon                             http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center
bruno at outerthought.org                          bruno at apache.org