Whenever I see a pdf symbol, I steer clear from it. Opening up acrobat through a web browser takes sometimes a whole minute, which seems little, but compare it with the post about 0.03s google searches.
Doesn’t it occur to adobe that many people won’t want to wait so long? Or are they content with business customers who enjoy the versatility of the software? I shouldn’t really be complaining, they gave it to me for free. But seriously, what’s the hold up?
I’ve often seen this said on the boards, which is why people warn in their post when they post a pdf link. But I don’t get it – pdfs load fine for me, on many different computers I’ve used. Do you have 256MB of ram or what?
So that’s the minimum requirement now, is it? :rolleyes:
There’s endless threads asking ‘why the PDF warnings?’ Some people have problems with browsers crashing, etc., and would prefer to save the file or open it externally. For this reason, I use PDF Download in Firefox, which lets me choose what to do with each PDF.
Another reason people want to be warned about PDFs is that they can be quite large, and more often than not, larger than what might be absolutely necessary when someone just wants to read a few lines or paragraphs, and instead, has to download an entire book.
As for Adobe Reader (Acrobat is the application that creates PDF files) taking so long to load, I’ve found that the current Version 7 is much faster than previous versions.
I don’t know, the computers are routinely use are 1.4 ~ 2.0 Ghz with at least 1GB of ram and PDFs do take a ridiculously long time to load if opened by the Adobe reader. The only computers on which this is not the case are running Mac OS X. My feeling is that this is intentional “adobe rigging” which it has been accused of in the past with its Photoshop line (I don’t know if anybody ever had any evidence, but Photoshop on PC does seem to run a lot crappier than it does on a Mac with no other reasonable explanation other than just bad code)
Foxit Reader is free, fast-loading, has a small footprint, and renders PDFs much more quickly than Adobe Acrobat Reader (this is particularly noticeable when scrolling around high-density documents such as maps).
See if this works for you:
Now try to click on a PDF link and see if it opens directly in Adobe Acrobat Reader and not the browser window. This is usually much faster.
Acrobat 6 is a system hog. Most of the load-up time is spent initializing .api files - these are DLLs that Acrobat uses for specific tasks. Many of these tasks are not needed for general PDF viewing so…
move all the .api files (and any subdirectories) from
Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader\Plug_ins
to
Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader\Optional
except for
**AHLS32.api
EWH32.api
IA32.api **
Acrobat will then not load all the plug_ins at startup, but only as required. Much faster for most PDFs.
Si
Which is why I advise moving on to Version 7.
As it is, they’re saying Version 8 is just around the corner, so get yourself current, if you can.
I’ve had v7 for a while. Doesn’t seem much better to me. I’ve moved all the plugins, too.
I use Foxit, mostly.
I have to disagree on this, although the problem I had may have been with the particular file I was working with. Backstory – I’ve been having problems with my PC at work lately due to the stupid way IT initially partitioned the hard drive - a 6GB C: drive and a 30+ GB D: drive. The C: drive is nearly completely full because of all the system files that go on C: every time I install something new, even if I install to D:. OK, so one of our helpful IT staff took off my Adobe Reader and installed Foxit, explaining how it took up less disk space, was much faster to load, etc. The next day I tried to open and print a 2-page PDF generated from MS Project. Foxit itself loaded pretty quickly but took several minutes to load the PDF, mostly because it was drawing every line on the grid one at a time. If I scrolled or resized it started redrawing the entire thing again. And it did the same thing in Print Preview. When I printed it, it sent a 14.4 MB file to the printer (as opposed to about 1.5 MB for Adobe) which I wound up having to kill after ten minutes when it got stuck and was blocking the print queue. Foxit lasted all of one day on my PC. I’d rather Adobe take 30 extra seconds to load if it means I don’t have to spend ten minutes trying to print something.
My fix was to find one of my old Computer Games Strategy Plus Magazine CDs and installed Adobe Reader 4.0 from them, with Adobe Reader 6.0 installed but not set as the default program for opening. 4.0 starts up quick (being designed for 1st gen Pentium computers or something along those lines) and if anything doesn’t work, I can load it in 6.0. Foxit Reader is probably a somewhat better solution though.
I just did this and 6.0 opens very quickly. Thanks!!
I just want to acknowledge infinite gratitude for so many fine folks answering questions like this.
I.e., Mrs. FtG was having trouble last weekend with Reader and IE (which I don’t use). I spent a very frustrating time trying to fix it. Uninstall and re-install a bunch of stuff.
I double checked that “Display PDF in browser” was set, etc.
Then I read this thread. You mean that is not supposed to be set? Fixed it.
Thanks to xash and the rest of the helpful SDMB universe.
(As opposed to the folks at the website she was using. They told her to click on the floppy icon to save a copy of the pdf. And of course the flag inside the pdf to forbid copying was turned on. Nice. Had to browse the temp Internet folder.)
I saw some link in another thread recently that had a PDF-like document that was instead a .SWF (Flash) file. It came up instantaneously and looked just fine.
If Macromedia goes after Adobe in this field, it seems they’ve got the technology to whoop them.
Too late. Adobe bought Macromedia.
As a related question, why is that after you read a pdf in Adobe Acrobat in Windows, it always hangs up your computer when you try to shut it down or just log off of a network?
Because Adobe is still running in the background and takes forever to exit.
So you can’t kill Adobe Acrobat and it won’t die?
Well you can most of the time. Sometimes it’s hard though.