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aesbjorn
Level 2

Loading RTF license file freezes the UI

Hi,

At my company I am migrating our existing installers to InstallShield. I have run into a problem with loading our end user license agreement (EULA) into the license dialog. It takes too long time and the UI freezes. What's worse is that the previous dialog window disappears and then pops back again - in a frozen state - and hangs there for a while before the EULA is finally shown. It gives a very bad impression of the installer where the user doesn't know what is going on.

The agreement is an RTF file and it's rather big, 320kB. I have it located in Support Files/Billboards under Language Independent. To my understanding it is extracted to a temporary directory, and that should already be finished when the user reaches the license dialog.
I have tried what happens when I reduce the size of the document by removing text (which of course is not a solution) and when it becomes smaller it loads faster. By removing even more it eventually reaches a point where the loading time is acceptable (unnoticeable).

Is this a known issue? I have not found any information related to this. If anyone has suggestions on how to fix it I would very much appreciate hearing them. Thanks.

/Albin
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(2) Replies
DLee65
Level 13

I cannot address why your RTF file is having problems but I can say that I too have a very large RTF for the license dialog and we do not see a performance hit.

I wonder if your RTF has some properties about it that causes it to have problems?
One of the things I have to do when our license changes, I have to go through and fix things such as remove hyperlink markup and some other formatting issues like remove page numbers line breaks. It is a nightmare and takes me close to a day to complete because of size and complexity. I have to open the RTF in notepad++ and edit the RTF markup there for this to work.

This is just food for thought as you work on this.

Oh, I should note that I am using a Suite project as well.
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aesbjorn
Level 2

Hi Dan, thanks for your reply.

I had considered it might be related to formatting. The RTF is produced by Word from a Word document source. When I do the conversion with Libre Writer instead the resulting file size is less than half of that produced by Word (but still doesn't load fast enough). But the formatting is different and manually looking over and fixing the text must be very time consuming like you say. And I don't want to take that on myself as I don't know if I may change any "legal stuff" in doing so.

By the way I'm using an Installscript MSI project.
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