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craftycurate
Inspiring
August 14, 2025
Question

Comment Handling in long PDFs very sluggish/buggy

  • August 14, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 498 views

I am working in Acrobat Pro 64-bit with a PDF which has 1500 comments, and I select "Collapse All" to make Acrobat more responsive, otherwise any actions relating to the Comments Panel are extremely sluggish, aking about half a second to process each click etc.

 

When I select "Collapse All", I find that the tabs for many later pages are not collapsed. In the end I had to wait around 5 minutes for Acrobat to process all the comments to the end of the list before "Collapse All" actually did what it was meant to do i.e. Collapse ALL.

 

Not sure this is a bug, just poor optimisation. I am on a fairly well specced computer, so I'd be surprised if this was the issue.

1 reply

Amal.
Amal.
Legend
August 14, 2025

Hi there,

Hope you are doing well and thanks for sharing the details. What you’re seeing with the "Collapse All" button in Acrobat Pro when working on a PDF with 1500+ comments is most likely due to performance limits, not a bug.

When there are so many comments, Acrobat takes time to go through them one by one. This is why some pages stay open for a while and it takes several minutes before all comments are collapsed. Even a fast computer can slow down with such a large file.

Here are some steps you can try and see if that works:

  • Do it in parts – Filter comments by page range, type, or author, and collapse them in smaller batches https://adobe.ly/4153WoA 
  • Hide the comments panel – Temporarily close it while doing other actions to make Acrobat respond faster.
  • Update Acrobat – Make sure you have the latest version 25.01.20623for the best performance go to help > check for updates and reboot the computer once.

Let us know how it goes

 

~Amal

C
craftycurateAuthor
Inspiring
August 28, 2025

Hi Amal

 

Thanks for your suggestions. Filtering might be the best option.

 

SImply closing the comments panel is not an option in my use case as I'm working through amends to a book, and the Comments panel contains all the amends so it needs to be permanently open.

 

I find that after waiting 5 minutes for the Comments panel to populate, I then "Collapse All" and then open only the page I'm working on, and this improves performance to where I can work with it.

 

Thanks

Richard

Amal.
Amal.
Legend
August 28, 2025

Hi there

 

Thanks for sharing your workflow with us. You're absolutely right, keeping the Comments panel open makes sense when you’re working through a large set of amends. Since performance can be impacted by the number of comments, your approach of collapsing all and expanding only the page you’re focused on is a smart workaround.

In addition to filtering, you might also find it helpful to try narrowing the comment view by reviewer, status, or type, this can sometimes reduce the load time and make navigation faster. Hopefully, this combined approach will make your review process a little smoother.

 

~Amal

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