I have a 5k iMac with OS X Yosemite. When using either Safari or Preview, some PDFs I view lag like crazy! I go to scroll and I get the spinning color wheel of death for a good 3-5 seconds before it actually scrolls about half an inch. I have mainly noticed this with PDFs uploaded to my hometown's website. The smaller PDFs on the site (2-3 pages) are no problem. It gets to be a problem when the PDFs are only like 8-10 pages... I would not consider that incredibly huge. I have tried downloading the PDF and viewing it with preview and it still sputters in the same way
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Viewing some PDF's on my iMac are slow
- Thread starter redhawk87
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1. Get rid of the transparency feature in system preferences (accessibility>display>reduce transparency).
2. Even better, use Skim ( http://skim-app.sourceforge.net) to view PDF files.
Let us know if either of those help.
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Apple messed up PDF in Yosemite big time. The good news is - El Capitan fixes this entirely. Just wait a month or two until it's out and you won't have any lag while reading PDF on your 5K iMac (you can try the public beta today and you'll notice the lag is gone). PDF is really smooth in El Cap, even the really big ones.