CorelDraw 2019 Oddity

[Lee DeRaud]

Upgraded a month or two back (from X7), finally got around to installing it on the laptop that talks to the laser.

Performance and functionality as good or better than the previous version (never a given these days), except for one thing: the copy function. If I want to duplicate an object, the normal (well, my normal) method is select, ctrl-C (copy), ctrl-V (paste), move to desired location. Never noticed it taking any detectable amount of time to complete any of those actions. With 2019, when I do ctrl-C, the cursor changes to an hourglass "wait" for nearly 5 seconds. Huh?

The delay does not seem to be related to the size/complexity of the drawing: it's the same delay even for a new drawing with only one object. But it only happens on the laptop, not the desktop...yeah, the laptop is slower, but not that much slower.

Anybody noticed anything similar?

[Gary Hair]

I see it in X8 quite often and I'm running it on a pretty powerful workstation. No pattern that I have noticed, but then again I'm not really looking for one.

[Tony Lenkic]

Lee.

Try Control / Duplicate of selected object (CTRL + D) then move to desired location.

[Kev Williams]

since my entire computer life with any OS above XP revolves around '*click*... have coffee and wait for something to happen', I've been doing some research about a solution, and came up with 'memory leaks' as a possible cause for click-slowdowns. Could be another program, could be Corel, could be it's not even the problem but it's interesting reading, give it a google...

[Lee DeRaud]

I see it in X8 quite often and I'm running it on a pretty powerful workstation. No pattern that I have noticed, but then again I'm not really looking for one.Huh. I skipped X8...wonder if they switched out the underlying UI toolkit or converted to JS for everything at some point.

The trend these days for big apps is to use a common codebase for Win10, Mac, Android, everything: least-common-denominator programming.

[Scott Shepherd]

Ctrl D when duplicating always worked great for me until the upgrades. One machine still does it perfectly, the other one does nothing but pop up a box and ask you how far to move it. The process I've always used is to grab and object, drag it over, then right click, which duplicates it where you dragged it to, then Ctrl D repeatedly to repeat that action. Now, I copy it and hit Ctrl D and it pops up a window and asks me how far to move it. I can't find the settings to make that stop and go back to working the way it used to. Works fine on one installation of it but not on the other.

Also one machines boots Corel up easy, the other takes about 10 minutes of being left alone to make it come up. None of the tips I've found online have fixed that either :(

[Lee DeRaud]

Ctrl D when duplicating always worked great for me until the upgrades. One machine still does it perfectly, the other one does nothing but pop up a box and ask you how far to move it. The process I've always used is to grab and object, drag it over, then right click, which duplicates it where you dragged it to, then Ctrl D repeatedly to repeat that action. Now, I copy it and hit Ctrl D and it pops up a window and asks me how far to move it. I can't find the settings to make that stop and go back to working the way it used to. Works fine on one installation of it but not on the other.Have you tried exporting the workspace from the installation that works and then importing it on the on that doesn't? I think all the settings are included in that file...

[Lee DeRaud]

Lee.

Try Control / Duplicate of selected object (CTRL + D) then move to desired location.And that works instantaneously, go figure. You'd think that would map internally to a copy-paste-nudge sequence, but apparently not.

At my age, the odds of me unlearning my old sequence in favor of this one are very low, unfortunately. We shall see. And if it does, I suspect I'm about to find out that ctrl-D does fatally unwanted things in some other critical app, e.g. Photoshop.

Addendum: just for giggles, I tried doing ctrl-D followed by ctrl-V, on the theory that I could remap ctrl-C to ctrl-D in Corel and bypass the retraining. What happens is, it does the dupe, and then pastes in whatever was on top of the clipboard (in this case, the object from the first test above)...complete with the 5-second delay. Ctrl-D appears to bypass the clipboard completely. I'll have to check if there are any Windows clipboard settings that are abnormal on this machine.

[Bruce Volden]

I still use CD11, never knew about ctrl-D!
I've always clicked on the object and hit the + key.
Huh--24 years later still learning.

Bruce

[Dave Garrett]

sounds like your corel 2019 is not communicating with your gpu? that could explain the lag. go to Tools, Options, Global, then under general tab see if you have "use gpu for vector previews"

[Lee DeRaud]

sounds like your corel 2019 is not communicating with your gpu? that could explain the lag. go to Tools, Options, Global, then under general tab see if you have "use gpu for vector previews"Same symptoms either way. It still feels like something related to clipboard access, like it's copying clipboard data to the NAS over the WiFi, which would at least explain why the laptop is so much slower than the hardwired desktop. MS claims clipboard data is memory-only, not disk, which begs the question of how clipboard history works. I've tried turning off clipboard history: again, no change in symptoms. (And no, clipboard cloud sync is not, and never was, turned on.

I've checked all the Corel settings, thinking possibly it's saving something to the NAS, but all of its backup/temp/whatever file locations are set to the local disk, in this case the laptop's SSD. This weirdness only affects Corel AFAICT, but it happens even when on a new almost-empty drawing that's never been saved.

[Lee DeRaud]

Update: I found this thread on the Corel forum indicating that the problem dates back to CD2017 and Win 10 update 1709. Since I had X7 previously, this is new to me even though it's been going on for at least two years.
https://community.coreldraw.com/talk/coreldraw_graphics_suite_2017/f/coreldraw-graphics-suite-2017/56662/windows-10-fall-creators-update---delay-in-various-functions?ReplySortBy=CreatedDate&ReplySortOrder=Ascending
A bunch of these people are having way worse problems than I am, depending on what video board and drivers they have installed. There's a post in there toward the bottom where a Windows SW developer did a deep dive and found some Windows API functions that CD calls repeatedly and unnecessarily.

[Gary Hair]

As a side note - SSD's have a finite number of writes and using them for temp/backup purposes will shorten their lifespan, possibly significantly. Whenever possible it is best to use a hard drive for temp and backup files or files you know will be written over often. SSD's really shine with writing and reading large files but they are not so great for small or temporary files.


Same symptoms either way. It still feels like something related to clipboard access, like it's copying clipboard data to the NAS over the WiFi, which would at least explain why the laptop is so much slower than the hardwired desktop. MS claims clipboard data is memory-only, not disk, which begs the question of how clipboard history works. I've tried turning off clipboard history: again, no change in symptoms. (And no, clipboard cloud sync is not, and never was, turned on.

I've checked all the Corel settings, thinking possibly it's saving something to the NAS, but all of its backup/temp/whatever file locations are set to the local disk, in this case the laptop's SSD. This weirdness only affects Corel AFAICT, but it happens even when on a new almost-empty drawing that's never been saved.

[Lee DeRaud]

As a side note - SSD's have a finite number of writes and using them for temp/backup purposes will shorten their lifespan, possibly significantly. Whenever possible it is best to use a hard drive for temp and backup files or files you know will be written over often. SSD's really shine with writing and reading large files but they are not so great for small or temporary files.Yeah, but that "finite number" is about 60TB-100TB for older drives and at least double that for newer ones. At 40GB per day (an insanely high number for a home-use computer), that works out to 4 years minimum. With a more typical usage profile, we're talking decades.