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Why can't Macs cope with PDFs?

emporiky said:
Even on the 15'' rMBP :eek: ? I thought its just the 13'' with HD 4000/ Iris :confused:

My iPhone and my girlfriend's iPad both cope better than my rMBP.
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Its not hardware (obviously) because it runs smooth as poo in W8.1 bootcamp, but even then it's not quite right.

Also on my work station at the office (dual Xeon with dual K2000s) it is good, but still not great, and file size doesn't matter.
 
Trying to reproduce the lag with several different pdf files and it seems that the problem is there only in full screen for me. When the document is not full screen scrolling and zooming is quite smooth, but when I maximize it (especially when there are 2 pages in once) zooming could be a problem.
 
Use Skim

I use a little program called skim on my mac it works great with pdfs, uses very little resources and is a good looking little App
 
roadbloc said:
Perhaps you could upload the file for us all to test out? This could be a file specific issue. The PDF I tested on my PBG4 and MBA is about 1.1MB, about 305 of text but no images.
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[file removed]
 
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chaofahn said:
Not sure how y'all are getting slow speeds. I work with 200mb+ PDFs here and it runs smooth as butter.

Although that said, I'm running it on the high-end 2014 Retina Macbook Pro.

To the OP, have you cleaned out your system with a sweeping program (like Onyx)?
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My Mac is literally four days old and was set-up as new (rather than Time Machine restored or something), so I can't believe it already needs something like Onyx.
 
roadbloc said:
Weird. Neither Preview 3 or 8 seemed to have any issues. No lag.
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That is weird. How on earth can the same file on the same OS and the same app act so differently. Unless there's a fault with this MBP? Does yours have the high res screen?

Even if you zoom in and then try and pan? For me, it freezes, displays the spinning wheel and then after about 5 seconds jumps to a different part of the image.
 
Tried both test files on my MBA 2012 Preview 8 - showed me beachballs.
 
Mildredop said:
That is weird. How on earth can the same file on the same OS and the same app act so differently. Unless there's a fault with this MBP? Does yours have the high res screen?

Even if you zoom in and then try and pan? For me, it freezes, displays the spinning wheel and then after about 5 seconds jumps to a different part of the image.
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Must be due to hardware differences maybe? Then again, I'd have thought the MBP would have outperformed both my PBG4 and MBA.

None of my devices have a retina display.

EDIT: Zooming lags on my MBA, producing beachballs. My PBG4 zooms and scrolls super smooth with no fuss.
 
roadbloc said:
Must be due to hardware differences maybe? Then again, I'd have thought the MBP would have outperformed both my PBG4 and MBA.

None of my devices have a retina display.

EDIT: Zooming lags on my MBA, producing beachballs. My PBG4 zooms and scrolls super smooth with no fuss.
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Apple makes me angry. Although Microsoft make me even angrier for not sorting themselves out and giving me a viable alternative.
 
roadbloc said:
PDF is Adobe's baby. Maybe using Adobe Reader will produce better results?
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I tried that (mentioned it a few posts back) and it's definitely better, but still quite crap.

Seems we've concluded that Macs don't like PDFs. Maybe Apple do it on purpose like they did with Flash.

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lun said:
Tried both test files on my MBA 2012 Preview 8 - showed me beachballs.
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Thanks for trying and reporting back. Glad it's not just me, then.
 
Yeap seem that my rMBP cant handle this pdf as well. I am used to some lag with pdf files, but this one seems particularly complicated for Apple :/
 
That's weird - i interact with pdfs extensively as a teacher and I find my 2012 macbook air handles them silky-smooth (and this is the base model). Much smoother than word documents at any rate. :p
 
I think the lag mainly applies to retina MBPs as the hardware has difficulties handling the high resolution.
 
Glad this isn't just me.

I had it on my mid-2009 MBP, and I've got it now on my top end 2014 rMBP.

Even if the PDF is only a few pages long and is simply text, zooming in and panning around is choppy and laggy.
 
It sounds like poorly written software. No laptop in production today is too slow to handle a PDF.

It might be helpful if the people who are experiencing problems post the software they are using to open the PDF and the full version number. Same for those who are not having problems.
 
I actually don't know why preview is crap.

You would think with Quartz being native PDF that any PDF app should be quick.

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Mildredop said:
I tried that (mentioned it a few posts back) and it's definitely better, but still quite crap.

Seems we've concluded that Macs don't like PDFs. Maybe Apple do it on purpose like they did with Flash.
Click to expand...

I really doubt that. It would kill all their text applications. Like NeXTStep used Display Postscript, OS X uses Quartz as its base format. Quartz is effectively display PDF.
 
Bizarre. I'm in academia, running a 2012 cMBP 13" 16gb machine, and have hardly ever had issues. I work with thousands of pdf's per year, and one of the main reasons I switched to Mac, was precisely because of how painful pdf manipulation was in Windows.

Using Preview, and several other apps focused on annotation, and I couldn't be happier.

Something odd must be happening your side. Good luck with getting to the bottom of it!
 
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