On Mon, 2004-03-08 at 10:00, James Devenish wrote: > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > on Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 09:33:06AM +0800, Robert Howells wrote: > > If only AR 6 would load as fast as AR5 it would be a pleasure > > What can be do about this? All the "Creative Suite" apps are implausibly > slow (I can't even express it in words because it sounds like I'm > exaggerating).
Nothing would surprise me, frankly. InDesign 2 takes a good minute minute to start up on one of our MacOS 9 G4/400s at work. Combine this with a frequent need to reboot (MacOS 9 + QuarkXPress + Suitcase + NT Server + iffy fonts), and it gets irritating fast. Acrobat 5 also takes forever - and it's not even the most recent version. > Acrobat Reader is a brilliant example -- I still use > version 3 because it's so much faster than any subsequent version (fast > at starting up, faster at displaying pages, faster at finding text, > faster at scrolling, etc, etc). Scrolling across a complex A3 document (classified ads) in Acrobat Reader 5... uck. It doesn't seem to pre-render the next page or so to memory, being content to slowly draw it while the user waits - and to block scrolling until it's finished rendering. > Each version gets slower in a way that > is measurable with a wall clock. My other concern about Acrobat Reader > is just how bad it is at rendering text. Most of my PDF usage is for > technical materials. The typical "office documents" serif typefaces are > rendered poorly for on-screen reading. Comparatively, text in Acrobat 4 > is "stunning" (and WYSIWYG!). I find it OK personally, though I think it probably over-smooths the type at small sizes, making it blurry and unreadable instead of ugly but readable. > Acrobat 5.0 was a downhill slide for the > user interface, too (I thought). For those with Macs and Mac OS X, > thankfully Apple has the 'Preview' app. On our dual 866MHz G4 at work (the machine I use for testing things on OSX), preview takes /forever/ to render pages. It seems to entirely re-render whenever I do anything - zoom, for example - so navigating documents can be really painful. Perhaps it was improved in 10.3. > Anyone know what the rest of > the world does? Is everyone just "putting up with it"? For my purposes (A3+ pages, often very complex, with CMYK and spot colour, plus complex fonts) Acrobat Reader is still the best choice. It's a little slow to start up, but nowhere near as bad as Acrobat or InDesign, and it's output is very good for my purposes. I'd pick it over Preview or xpdf any day (though both definitely have their uses). If only Adobe would release Acrobat Reader 6 for their /other/ supported platforms... Craig Ringer
