These forums are now Read Only. If you have an Acrobat question, ask questions and get help from one of our experts.

Very long lag time between when I insert a comment & when it appears

paularae
Registered: Sep 17 2007
Posts: 13

I'm running Acrobat 8 Professional. Scenario: I've inserted a number of comments (editing-type comments) in a PDF (size can be from 50 pages to 400 pages or more).

Acrobat's performance becomes slower and slower whenever I add a new comment (any kind - a strikethrough, added text, a highlight, a note). I've had to wait as long as 10 seconds from the time I type the comment to when it appears in the PDF. During the 10 seconds, Acroat is frozen. This problem causes me to be very inefficient -- I can't review more than a few pages per day when this happens. The size of the file can doesn't seem to matter -- it's as if Acrobat reaches some limit of the amount of comments that I can place in the document, and then performance drops dramatically after that.

In previous versions of Acrobat (I've had the same problem in Acrobat 6 and Acrobat 7), not only was there a 10 second lag, but Acrobat would also automatically create a second copy of the file (identical to the original copy). I'd have to close Adobe and restart it -- after a while, Acrobat would create a new copy automatically again (both copies in sync).

Does anyone know why this lag time occurs and what I can do to correct it??
Thanks,
Paula Cross

billycar
Registered: Aug 23 2007
Posts: 25
I have a similar thread going, with no response other than my own experiments, reporting my results.

See:
http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=1048

Which also links you to another similar thread, but response time is "discussed" in terms of JavaScript.

I divided my 3 page Spreadsheet form, into 3 files ... it speeds up the refresh 2x.
billycar
Registered: Aug 23 2007
Posts: 25
Perhaps if you turn off "Check Spelling While Typing" under Preferences > Spelling (Acrobat 6 Pro), things will speed up?I'm guessing it checks the spelling of everything that's ever been entered, every time you enter something new, and close the Comment window session or whatever text entering task you're doing ...

Just guessing, though ...
billycar
Registered: Aug 23 2007
Posts: 25
Did you have a chance to try this?
paularae
Registered: Sep 17 2007
Posts: 13
Hi,
Yes, I finally had a larger PDF to edit, and I tried the change - no, unfortunately, I can't really say that it helped. The lag time is still there (perhaps there's the tiniest bit of difference, but barely noticeable).

Any other ideas are much appreciated!
Thanks,
Paula Cross
paularae [at] us [dot] ibm [dot] com
billycar
Registered: Aug 23 2007
Posts: 25
I broke my measly 3 page document into 3 files (basically since each page has a spreadsheet-like appearance), and the speed jumped considerably.

I also reprogrammed my calculation of time difference, so that not all of them are recalculated every time I change one ... my main use of the form is Time Difference = Task Start - Task Stop, for 20+ tasks for 7 days a week ... a fair number of RE-calculations ...

That probably made the biggest difference: making the calculation local, versus global.

Maybe breaking up your document into chapters ... sets of pages ... whatever scheme might be logical for your work, would help.
paularae
Registered: Sep 17 2007
Posts: 13
Thanks for your continuing to try to figure out this very strange problem.

Yes, that's exactly what I've been doing - extracting pages from the document to break it into chunks.

The main difficulties in breaking up the document is that the TOC navigation no longer works (of course), so it's a big harder to go back and forth, or to do a global search looking for something (say, I see an occurrence of a term that I don't rmeember seeing - I want to search through the document to see if that's the first occurrence of this term/concept). And then, if I want to make a comment in one of the previous "chunks", I end up with several chunks of the PDF open at the same time.

All in all, breaking up the PDF into chunks is still faster than waiting 15 seconds for every comment I make to appear in the "big" PDF.

It's still a strange thing there's no Adobe documentation about this problem -- hard for me to believe that me and two other editors in my company are the only people having this problem when making editing comments in a PDF...

Thanks again for your help!