
Why does Adobe Acrobat take 15 minutes to open a PDF? - thinkcomp
I do a lot of graphic design work. I have over 2,000 fonts. (Yes, I do use them.) Adobe Acrobat routinely takes 10 to 15 minutes (I'm not exaggerating) to open up a PDF file, whether it uses 1, 2, 10, 100 or no fonts at all. According to FileMon from Microsoft, it's because Acrobat loads every single font on my system before rendering the file. This makes no sense--especially because if I were to actually try to use one of those fonts not already embedded in the document by editing the file, it would re-load them all over again.<p>Some time is also spent reading and updating a local MySQL database called the "organizer." I've never used the Acrobat organizer. Not once. I suspect 99.999% of Acrobat users don't even know it's there, yet every time I open a PDF, I wait for it. There's no way to clear it except by manually locating the files it uses on your filesystem and deleting them.<p>Unrelated but equally infuriating: Acrobat insists on printing 100% black rectangles (meaning 0% C, 0% M, 0% Y, 100% K) as a mixture of C M and Y ink on my Xerox Phaser 6180MFP/N color laser printer. Illustrator prints the same exact PDF file properly using only black ink on the same printer.<p>Can someone from Adobe explain to me why this is reasonable? I've paid Adobe thousands of dollars over the year for its products. When can I expect to open a PDF in 2 seconds or less like I could with Acrobat 3.0 on my 100MHz Pentium ten years ago? When will Acrobat actually work?<p>(Before you say, "Use Preview!" know that I've already tried. It doesn't render my PDFs properly. It rasterizes things that shouldn't be rasterized and it draws lines that aren't there. Adobe made the PDF spec, I like PDFs, and I want to use Adobe's software.)
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rdamico
This is Ryan Damico from crocodoc (YC Winter 2010), an online app for marking
up and reviewing PDF files (as well as other document types). One of the
reasons we started crocodoc is that Adobe's tools for working with PDF files
(including Reader) are way behind the times (e.g. slow, desktop based,
difficult to collaborate).

That said, crocodoc is still early in development and has some kinks of its
own we're working on, but we think there's a lot of room for innovation in
this space. Would love to hear any feedback!

crocodoc demo: <http://crocodoc.com/demo>

~~~
10ren
Cool concept, marking-up documents is big business. Legal depts we negotiated
licenses with would _always_ do it by emailing a Word doc, with its
diff/review feature that looks very nice, and comments. My book publisher also
used it for reviewer feedback.

Unsolicited feedback: It looks beautiful!

It's _much_ slower than google gview and scribd (but they don't allow
annotations, so it's apples/oranges... but still). Why don't you pre-scan the
demo document? I know it's cheating, but it gives a better first impression
(and, to me, it would feel reasonable if my own document took a few moments
longer to process than the demo. Best foot forward etc).

I wish you'd have an "upload doc" textfield prominently on the demo page -
without it, I assumed you had to open an account; it was just luck that I
happened to read the FAQ saying that you could. But it didn't say how, so I'm
scratching my head. Luckily, I tried going to the front page, there it was.
You're making me think too much, just to get started, which is an easy place
to lose someone: I think you're losing trials by not having it on the demo
page either - that's the natural place for a "load" document.

Also, Your style of upload file/URL form is popular, but I really think there
must be a better way! Perhaps one textfield, with two buttons (upload and file
browse). You enter your doc, file or web, and the uploader sorts it out; the
file browser is just a convenience. Maybe also have a google search, if people
don't have the URL immediately on hand (must be a common case).

~~~
rdamico
Thanks for the constructive feedback -- your comments are very helpful. If you
ever feel like telling us more about what we can do to make crocodoc a no-
brainer to use, drop us an email through our site :)

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garyrichardson
Also, why is there always a new version of Acrobat Reader to install? Also,
why does adobe launch a relatively huge app to detect and tell me this
whenever I'm in the middle of doing something important. It's like it knows
"Oh, the system is under a lot of load already, I should fire up now since the
user is clearly at his computer"

I only have Adobe Reader installed to handle fill in form apps (IE, passport
renewal). In the past, I've manually deleted the adobe autoupdater from my
system to avoid the slow downs. It's worse than spyware.

~~~
sidmitra
I use foxit, for generic PDF viewing, also SumatraPDF is a whole lot quick
too. I've never installed Adobe Reader in over 3-4 years and haven't missed it
so far.

~~~
ukdm
SumatraPDF is fantastic. Fastest PDF viewer I've ever used.

~~~
nixy
Sumatra is nice, but Preview on OS X is even faster. It loads PDF documents as
if they were text documents.

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GeneralMaximus
It appears Adobe isn't interested in making software anymore. Flash is slow,
Acrobat is slow and Photoshop will refuse to work for completely arbitrary
reasons (like having a case sensitive filesystem).

Guys, looks like Adobe could use some competition :p

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malkia
Check couple of things:

\- Use procmon, not filemon - enable durations.

\- Use dependancy walker, load the acrobat executable from there. Check all
checkboxes on. Press F7

~~~
paraschopra
Hey, can you expand on the tools to be used for investigating a resource hog?
Bit off topic, but I feel that my system crawls with Firefox or Chrome in
spite of having 4 G of RAM. How do I go about investigating what is the actual
bottleneck?

~~~
malkia
Hi paraschopra,

There are many tools, depending on what you are doing (io, network, memory,
cpu). In my case, the problems are with the tools written by us for our
studio, so we just use our own profilers that the tools are compiled with
(check DEJA, DressCode).

It's only for code where we don't have source code, or we don't have time to
put profiling probes then we use external tools - for example VerySleepy for
sampling, or some of the SysInternals tools.

But sometimes the answer is just few clicks of google, or serverfault.com /
userfault.com, etc.

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aj
Well acrobat loads not just fonts but a whole bunch of plugins, some of them
unused or unnecessary for most users. If you remove those plugins (you will
have to manually delete them from the acrobat folder - Google for it), you
should notice a dramatic increase in loading times. (I have tried this and it
works as advertised)

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cpr
Seems like Acrobat jumped the shark a few versions back.

It's a monster.

Sounds like you need to use some font management software, though, which will
allow you to load up sets as you need them, rather than having them always
available.

~~~
zokier
Actually recent versions of Acrobat have been rather snappy for me.

+1 for font management software. Yes, its a hackish solution, but if it works,
then...

~~~
jpravetz
Yes, recent versions are snappy. I run Acrobat Pro 9.3.2 on Mac OS X and
launch time isn't an issue. Acrobat delay-loads plug-ins, so the plug-in issue
is mitigated.

I don't doubt the font-induced launch time delays, however. I think I've heard
this one before.

Did you report the printing bug to Adobe?

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SomeCallMeTim
Don't know about the color printing issue, but I use Sumatra PDF reader
instead of Adobe Reader for 95%+ of my PDF reading:

<http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html>

It's free, and it's light, and it's fast. And it doesn't bother you at
inopportune times asking whether you want to upgrade. Given that, why would
you want to use Adobe's software?

Every now and again a document won't render correctly, and then I'll use
Acrobat Reader--which sometimes also fails to render it correctly. But what
can you do.

~~~
thinkcomp
Well, it's not two-seconds fast, but it's better than 15 minutes. Thanks!

~~~
w1ntermute
Huh?

 _Before you say, "Use Preview!" know that I've already tried. It doesn't
render my PDFs properly. It rasterizes things that shouldn't be rasterized and
it draws lines that aren't there. Adobe made the PDF spec, I like PDFs, and I
want to use Adobe's software._

I thought you were running OS X, and that alternative PDF viewers didn't work
for you because they didn't adhere to the PDF specs as strictly as Acrobat.

~~~
thinkcomp
I didn't say that. I'm running Windows on my primary machine and Mac OS on my
office machines. Preview in particular doesn't do a very good job.

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pclark
<http://dearadobe.com>

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babo
Adobe bashing is quite a trend but in this case I'm pretty sure that it's not
Acrobat per se which causing the slowness. Last time when I've seen a similar
case some corrupted fonts were the core of the problem, but your hardware
setup, OS, filesystem, number of files are also more likely to blame than
Adobe.

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laxk
Try to use foxit reader (<http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/>) It's
ultra fast. I use this product for a couple of years and forgot about the
acrobat reader as a nightmare.

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RDE
Use a small trusty that does not phone home:

<http://www.oldversion.com/Acrobat-Reader.html>

~~~
JoachimSchipper
... and is full of known security holes. No thanks.

~~~
orlandu63
The OP is using Acrobat for graphics design, not for online-PDF reading. I
don't think he has to worry about security holes that he or his coworkers can
exploit.

~~~
ja27
But you have to actively disable the plugins Acrobat installs for online
reading or else your browsers are wide open. Lots of bad sites (and ads)
launch malicious PDF files that you never see.

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Ujjwol
Seems like you forgot to open scanned PDF files. It will take years to scroll
one page.

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rethink
I think this was one of Zucker's feature requests.

