Mathcad Prime 2&3 extremely slow, cannot execute printing.

[panos.roussos]

Hello,

I am having a huge problem with one of my main workshheets that I just converted from Mathcad 15.

-It is painfully slow, it takes 2 minutes to scroll down one page, about the same time to click somewhere and actually see the cursor at that location.

-I did the conversion on Prime 2.0 on my work office. Then I found myself out of the office and without remote control of my work computer, so I decided to have a quick download of the 30-day trial version on my laptop so i can review something very quickly. I loaded the worksheet on Prime 3.0 (equally slow, if not even worse). I did a minor appearance edit on my worksheet and saved it. Went back to the office and the file saved by Prime 3.0 does not open in Prime 2.0 (it just opens an empty file). The file size has changed from 2MB to 700KB (Does Prime 3.0 use a different compression system?). It still loads fine on Prime 3.0 (if you are patient enough) but I'm screwed as this is a trial version and my office Prime 2.0 cannot be upgraded (for some mysterious reason).

-And now the worst of all. I try to print out a PDF report of the whole sheet with PDFCreator. It freezes for about 2 hours and then dissappears without creating anything. During all this time, the memory usage goes up to 100% (!!!) What, am I compiling a movie or something... I tried out printing out to XPS or straight to printer device. Same.

My office workstation is a power computer on which I run other heavy numerical codes, 8 CPUs and 32GB RAM. My laptop is also brand new powerful Dell, i7, 8GB RAM. I have never managed to freeze it with any other application. Mathcad will always predictably freeze everything in printing.

Any idea? Anybody else with the same problem?

I am hesitant to circulate the worksheet because it contains company proprietary data but could PM someone if they want to assess the situation for themselves.

Note that the same worksheet was working flawlessly with Mathcad 15, loading fast, and printing with no problem at all. Also note that the worksheet is pretty long, about 40 pages, but doesn't have any advanced mathematics in it at all. A lot of expressions, some if statements and a bunch of graphs (i will resist the temptation to complain about the plots of Mathcad Prime...) Please, dear PTC, will you please abort this Prime nonsense and go back to Mathcad 15??? This is hopeless. Any clues appreciated. Thanks, Panos

[Werner_E]

Prime really is very lame but I guess it shouldn't be that slow like you describe it. But then, it may depend on the size and content of the worksheet.

Prime2 and Prime3 data formats are different - Prime3 can read Prime2 format, but that won't work the other way around. Prime3 only can save in Prime3 format - so as soon as you save a sheet with Prime3, there is no way back to Prime2. Yes, its ridiculous, but thats the way PTC has decided to implement things. Thats the reason Prime2 only shows an empty sheet when opening your edited P3 sheet.

The change of size may be because when converting a file, the full MC15 worksheet is included in he final converted sheets xml structure. It seems this legacy part is omitted when you save it again wit P3.

Not sure about your printing problem. I also noticed myself that Prime chokes on worksheets which work fluid and flawless in M15. And given that and other drawbacks of Prime, I am very happy that a few days ago we came to the decision not to wait if or when Prime becomes useable but instead switch over slowly to alternatives, using MC15 in the meantime as along as possible and applicable. It wasn't an easy decision but I am glad as at the moment it seems I will never be forced to do anything serious in Prime.

So while Prime sure takes up a lot of memory and maybe thats even done in an inefficient way, I never experienced that problem when printing, neither to a physical nor to a pdf printer (and amongst others I am using pdf creator as well). But I then I think I never tried to print a 40 page document, that may make for the difference. I guess smalled documents print fine your you, too?

[panos.roussos]

Werner, thanks for this info. I was not aware that Prime3 format is not backwards compatible for Prime2. Even with losing the Math Formatting or whatever, it should, at the very least, be able to load the actual math and clear text parts. I also wish they would state it clear upon downloading. I assume (now, after checking a few other related posts in this forum) that there is neither a workaround for this nor a third party converter to do this job.

Yes, I can print other smaller worksheets albeit still kinda slow. Meanwhile I realised that I can actually print only to physical printer, and only page by page, one at a time! It takes about 10 minutes before it manages to send the order to the printer each time. You can imagine the first time I had forgotten I had tried the one single page, when it started coming out of the printer 10 mins later. I would be very curious to know what on earth occupies SO MUCH memory during a printing process.

Anyways this was the very final shot I had with Prime. Big waste of time, I feel even uncomfortable to post all this editing time I spent for nothing into the timesheet. I will stick to M15 for as long as it takes until company perhaps switches to other software in the future.