Preview lag while editing PDF/moving text boxes around

[izzy0242mr]

I think this happened on macOS 12, too, but I've noticed it and finally grabbed a recording from Ventura. Sometimes, but not always, when editing a PDF, objects like shapes, text boxes, and signatures will have horribly bad lag. Just watch the attached video to see what I mean.

Any ways to avoid this or fix?

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[Slartibart]

How do you edit the PDFs? Which program? This happens randomly or with specific PDFs? If the latter, are these PDFs where the text isn’t a vector but a bitmap - scanned pages (maybe even at a high resolution) which weren’t converted to text? If it is specific PDFs, did you try a different program like e.g. Skim or Acrobat?

Besides: If this is happens, what does the activity monitor tell?

 

[izzy0242mr]

This happens randomly or with specific PDFs? If the latter, are these PDFs where the text isn’t a vector but a bitmap - scanned pages (maybe even at a high resolution) which weren’t converted to text?

Besides: If this is happens, what does the activity monitor tell?

All great questions.

It is usually PDFs that were created from text documents (i.e., not OCRd). Can't recall if I've had it happen to PDFs without selectable text (I don't work with those very often), but can't say for sure. But it's seemingly random otherwise (i.e., not confined to certain docs).

I haven't checked Activity Monitor—next time it happens I will. Although in the past, when this started happening and I opened up QuickTime to screen record, the problem would sometimes stop. I just got lucky this time when it didn't go away after opening QuickTime and starting screen recording. So I am not 100% sure how long whatever the issue is is persisting in the application process.

 

[flallnatural]

I have been having this issue as well consistently on the latest macOS (Ventura 13.2.1). Extremely lagging. Did not occur in older versions of Ventura but I am not sure when the problem actually started.

Did you find a fix?

 

[izzy0242mr]

I have been having this issue as well consistently on the latest macOS (Ventura 13.2.1). Extremely lagging. Did not occur in older versions of Ventura but I am not sure when the problem actually started.

Did you find a fix?

No fix. And it's been happening since before 13.2.1 for me. It doesn't happen every time, though, so I'm still not sure what causes it.

 

[Ruggy]

I have had this happen too and in my case it was something to do with the .pdf.
Try resaving it and see if the same thing happens with the copy.