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I have a large .pdf file (it's an electronic textbook) and was wondering how I could decrease the lag when scrolling. I tried breaking it up into smaller sections (about 20-page pdf's) but that didn't help. I'm thinking scrolling is so slow because each page is some sort of image.

So are there any other steps I can take to reduce the choppiness when scrolling?

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5 Answers 5

up vote 4 down vote accepted

How is the PDF compressed? If it is black and white only, it may be using a compression method that leads to choppy behaviour.

I was recently dealing with a product manual that was a black and white only scan. It was compressed using JBIG2, and it stuttered enormously when scrolling, even on a top-of-the-line MacBook.

I opened the document in Adobe Acrobat, and recompressed it using ZIP, and the scrolling problem went away entirely.

If you have Acrobat Pro, the steps I took were: Open the file -> Save As -> "Optimised PDF" -> Change the "Monochrome Images" compression dropdown to "ZIP" -> Ok.

It does increase the size of the file (from 1.2 MB to 3 MB), but I can actually skim the document now.

I think it mostly boils down to the fact that JBIG2 is compute-intensive, and Most PDF applications don't render the document much ahead of the current page.


If you don't have Acrobat, and you can post the PDF, I can take a look at it for you.

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Using an alternate PDF viewer, eg. Skim, might improve performance.

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What are the specifications of your Mac? If you have very little RAM, that might impact your system speed overall.

UPDATE According to your screen shot, this is a mid-2010 MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM. This is a fast computer with sufficient RAM for this task, so this is not the problem.

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"Print to pdf" then open result in Preview again. It is a temporary fix or you could resave it this way for a permanent fix.

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You could hit the space-bar which will open Preview.app The file won't open with any Adobe program that way and won't lag.

Works great unless you have to edit the files for example, because you cannot achieve that with Preview.app.

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