We are currently running into an issue in which the latency for our offshore (India) users is making it very difficult for them to compare PDF documents. We are noticing that Reader/Acrobat screen refreshes are considerably slower when updating from a scroll. (India Users Remoting to Desktop VMs here state-side, and viewing State-side PDFs). We are looking at other Remote Desktop software/hardware solutions, but we are hoping we might be able curb some of the pain our offshore users are experiencing more immediately by perhaps some settings in Reader/Acrobat. We believe turning off Smooth Line Art and Smooth Images may have helped, but we are looking to gain further performance. Any help and suggestions are appreciated. Thanks
Things that will help speed up such efforts are:
Reduce the number of colors - fewer bits per pixel. If you are only comparing B&W documents - drop it way down to 256 colors.
Eliminate backgrounds to a single, even, color.
Remove extraneous desktop items.
Turn off any (all) desktop animation.
Turn off any auto update screen items (e.g. clocks)
Turing off Smooth Line Art/Smooth Images helps because it turns off anti-aliasing. Which dumps a lot of screen data at the edges of objects. However, converting text to outlines won't. There is nothing visual that is being changed.
We use remote servers in a manner very similar - the above things are a huge help to the remote worker. And if that doesn't work, then you may need to look at your network. Any latency, congestion, etc. you can eliminate? You may not need to increase capacity - just remove obstacles.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Douglas Hanna is a member of the Production Print Technology team at Aon.
www.aonhewitt.com