Acrobat SO SLOW...

[OriginalScuddy]

I spend hours daily using Acrobat with Pitstop Pro and FusionPro to work on customer-supplied PDFs and add variable data elements for mailings. Most of the time Acrobat works pretty well, but it does crash a few times per week for no apparent reason. Then we get to the more complicated files customers send in. We do mailings for some Las Vegas Casinos and they love graphics and shading. The files are supplied as native Indesign files that I export to PDF/X 2008. The files are usually only around 30-40 MB, but Acrobat is almost unusable sometimes. You click on an element and you get the Not Responding message in the title bar and it freezes up for 15-45 seconds. Every single move or action causes this. A few months back I switched to Acrobat 64-bit, but it didn't really help much. It really makes me want to pull my hair out working with these files.

My current machine is an AMD 3800XT with 128GB of RAM and an NVME SSD. I put together an AMD 7900 with 128GB of RAM and a PCI Gen 5 SSD to see if that would speed things up at all, but I have almost zero expectations that it will. I think it is just poor coding.

So they just released fusion pro that works w 2023 acrobat. I couldn’t get it to work w 64bit. Roll back to 2021 32 bit.

Doubt it a pc issue unless you have stuff bogging it down.

 

[kdw75]

So they just released fusion pro that works w 2023 acrobat. I couldn’t get it to work w 64bit. Roll back to 2021 32 bit.

Doubt it a pc issue unless you have stuff bogging it down.

I have been using the FusionPro with Acrobat 64-bit for several months. Haven't had any issues with it so far, unless it is contributing to the delays and sluggishness.

 

[Dov Isaacs]

@kdw75,

I got similar results to those of @abc when I ran Acrobat Pro's inventory of the file.

The ad agency may be very punctual and a pleasure to deal with, but they clearly are going overboard in terms of gratuitous use of gradients (i.e., the “smooth shades”). I suspect that the graphic artists in question have libraries of very complex special effects that they use in Adobe Illustrator for each segment of these pages, save as PDF, and then place into InDesign. Not only is each segment very/overly complex with excessive use of highly complex (i.e., not just linear and/or radial) gradients, but because the segments are individually placed into InDesign, the shading definitions are not shared in any way.

In terms of “refining” the final PDF file, if what you are referring to is the Prinergy feature of that name, all that does is convert to PostScript and redistill back to PDF, hoping for some optimization along the way – a nice 1990's era technique before Prinergy was able to use the Adobe PDF Print Engine. PDF smooth shades => PostScript smooth shades => PDF smooth shades. That wouldn't solve this problem.

- Dov

 

[kdw75]

@kdw75,

I got similar results to those of @abc when I ran Acrobat Pro's inventory of the file.

The ad agency may be very punctual and a pleasure to deal with, but they clearly are going overboard in terms of gratuitous use of gradients (i.e., the “smooth shades”). I suspect that the graphic artists in question have libraries of very complex special effects that they use in Adobe Illustrator for each segment of these pages, save as PDF, and then place into InDesign. Not only is each segment very/overly complex with excessive use of highly complex (i.e., not just linear and/or radial) gradients, but because the segments are individually placed into InDesign, the shading definitions are not shared in any way.

In terms of “refining” the final PDF file, if what you are referring to is the Prinergy feature of that name, all that does is convert to PostScript and redistill back to PDF, hoping for some optimization along the way – a nice 1990's era technique before Prinergy was able to use the Adobe PDF Print Engine. PDF smooth shades => PostScript smooth shades => PDF smooth shades. That wouldn't solve this problem.

- Dov

One way we have "fixed" this issue is to simply rasterize the page. I hate doing that as I know it isn't ideal, but it works.

 

[abc]

That's really the only (safeish) option I think, out of interest what resolution do you use?

 

[kdw75]

I have used 600 dpi in the past and it still looked fine in my eyes.