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Why does Adobe Acrobat take 15 minutes to open a PDF?
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.
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.
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.
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?
(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.)
- aj 16y agoWell 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)
- cpr 16y agoSeems 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.
- thinkcomp 16y agoI'm downloading some kind of font manager from Extensis right now. I was thinking I'd just use the copy of ATM Deluxe I have (and paid for) somewhere...except that it doesn't support Windows XP. And Adobe discontinued it five years ago. Brilliant.
- zokier 16y agoActually 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 16y agoYes, 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?
- ThomPete 16y agoI would always use font management. No one uses 2000 fonts at the same time and with font management you can group them into different categories. Also if they are needed most applications will ask for them and activate them. So no need to keep them active all the time. I seem to remember that windows would take longer to load if my font folder where filled with stuff but I might be wrong (it might have been the amount of files I left on my desktop) Personally I prefer Linotype FontExplorerX http://www.fontexplorerx.com/ http://www.fontexplorerx.com/ It exist as a free version too which is normally more then you need.
- garyrichardson 16y agoAlso, 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 16y agoI 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.
- CWIZO 16y agoI can't count how many times friends/family have thanked me when I introduced them to Foxit. They couldn't believe how fast it is. Truly an amazing product.
- ukdm 16y agoSumatraPDF is fantastic. Fastest PDF viewer I've ever used.
- nixy 16y agoSumatra is nice, but Preview on OS X is even faster. It loads PDF documents as if they were text documents.
- malkia 16y agoCheck 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 16y agoHey, 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 16y agoHi 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.
- GeneralMaximus 16y agoIt 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
- SomeCallMeTim 16y agoDon'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 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 16y agoWell, it's not two-seconds fast, but it's better than 15 minutes. Thanks!
- w1ntermute 16y agoHuh? 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 16y agoI 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.
- rethink 16y agoI think this was one of Zucker's feature requests.
- rdamico 16y agoThis 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 http://crocodoc.com/demo
- 10ren 16y agoCool 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 16y agoThanks 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 :)
- Ujjwol 16y agoSeems like you forgot to open scanned PDF files. It will take years to scroll one page.
- pclark 16y agohttp://dearadobe.com http://dearadobe.com
- RDE 16y agoUse a small trusty that does not phone home: http://www.oldversion.com/Acrobat-Reader.html http://www.oldversion.com/Acrobat-Reader.html
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago... and is full of known security holes. No thanks.
- orlandu63 16y agoThe 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.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoAs long as you only use it for "trusted" documents, old versions should be fine. But you can, for instance, never install it as the "default" PDF reader on an internet-connected system.
- ja27 16y agoBut 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.
- babo 16y agoAdobe 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.
- dreadlabs 16y agoNot to start a fanboy argument but this is one of the reasons i like Ubuntu. Native PDF support and it opens the files very quickly. I used to detest PDF files back in the day when i used Windows. I eventually found foxit but that became bloatware too, and then Sumatra, which is much better.
- laxk 16y agoTry to use foxit reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/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.
- gamma_raj 16y agoFoxit rocks. Try it..