Why can't Macs cope with PDFs?

[glenthompson]

Not denying your experiences, but I've always had the complete opposite experience. I've always marvelled at how smooth PDFs were handled in OS X since days of 10.0 (or so). I can scroll, zoom through simple PDFs like butter (phone bills, etc).

I looked up the most intense PDF I could find. In this case it's a PDF of a front page of my city paper: http://www.smh.com.au/frontpage/2007/04/13/frontpage.pdf.

And, yes, that certainly chugs on my rMBP when zooming in and out (1920 scaled mode).

I grabbed a copy of that and tried it 3 different ways. First was viewing in Safari - very quick and smooth. Second was in Preview - smooth scrolling but a bit jerky with zoom. No beachballs. Third was with Acrobat Reader - very smooth and no lag.

All this on a late 2011 MBP with SSD and lots of memory.

 

[pendragon1984]

I have a rMPB 750m and some PDFs do lag quite a bit while others run smooth and without issue. I don't know what it is about those that lag which make them behave this way. It is annoying sometimes though.

 

[8CoreWhore]

PDF's in Preview are known to freeze and stutter when trying to scroll no matter how much power you have.

I have better luck doing this -

In View, choose Single Page. Zoom in to a comfortable reading level. You can scroll within just that page. When you want to go to the next page, just hit the right arrow button on your keyboard. Rinse and repeat.

I used to choose Continuous Scroll and it would perform poorly.