Blurb Forums

problems with BookSmart 1.8.1

I have several problems with Booksmart 1.8.1 and hope that someone out there might have solved them. 

1.  Light areas, usually skies, in printed images show vertical banding.

2. When working, it’s slow: It took about 3 minutes to load a single 2271×1588 pixel image into  a page template.  

3.  Sometimes it freezes up.    

4.  Now, after generating about 25 pages of mixed text and images, the program crashes and sends me an apology.  I am then either unable to reload the book or it takes about 5 minutes to load.  In the second case, any additional editing causes it to crash again.  This happens both in Windows XP (SP2) and Vista.

Any help would be apprciated.

1.8.1 is very unstable and full of bugs, as you have discovered.  I had 3 and 4 happen extensively.  I am not sure what the solution is but some things that seemed to help were: Don’t run other apps while running booksmart.  The freeze happens many times if you scroll pages too fast with the mouse (it happened to be frequently that way), and it seemed to happen more in the beginning when it hasn’t apparently loaded all of the images and pages yet.  So I woul let it load, not touch it for a few minutes and then start scrolling gingerly.  Basically try to minimize fast mouse/click movements.  Of-course, you might also try turning off the lights in the room and do a voodoo dance in the full monty and it might make the same difference.