Fix a Problem · Everyday · 3 min
The drawing is slow to open or to move around
Large sheets take time to draw. Here is how to tell why, and what helps.
The same A0 sheet can paint in a tenth of a second or in several seconds, depending on how dense it is, not how many megabytes it is. A 0.5 MB drawing of one crowded sheet can be slower than a 200-page set.
Find out why
Choose Why is this drawing slow? (from the status bar's drawing line, or Ctrl+F). It reports what’s in the file: how many pages, how dense the lines are, whether it carries large pictures or layers, and which pages are heaviest.
In DatoMark Why is this drawing slow?
What usually helps
- Wait for the first sheet. The first paint of a dense sheet is the slow one; moving round after that’s quick. A bar at the top moves while it works, and doesn’t pretend to know how long it will take.
- Close other tabs and windows: a browser gives each only so much memory.
- Turn off snapping on a very dense sheet (click Snap in the status bar), since reading its vectors is the costly part.
- Split a huge set into smaller files, or remove pages you don’t need from the set.
- A scan at a very high resolution is slow because it’s big. It won’t get better in the viewer.