Acrobat DC Pro - Slow Document Saving

[Guest]

Product - Acrobat DC Pro

Version - 2019.012.20035

I have a few users leveraging Acrobat DC Pro that have suddenly begun to see extremely long times and application freezes when saving documents of 50+ pages.

These files are being opened as PDFs, typically having 1-5 pages removed and then being resaved as PDFs. These slow downs do not appear to occur on smaller batches.

According to them, the issues have arisen in the past few weeks.

It appears that each page is being processed upon being saved but disabling various features does not appear to be helping at all.

Moreover, it doesn't appear that Acrobat is using many resources during this time and simply becomes unresponsive before saving the document.

Are there any settings that would cause additional post-processing to occur when saving a document that was already a PDF to begin with?

OCR does not appear to be the culprit as disabling the feature changes very little beyond the way the progress bar displays itself, though I notice that the resultant PDF increases in 10MB chucks when OCR is disabled.

[ls_rbls]

Hello,

Are the original files scanned copies of documents? Are these files in post script  format or any other format before they are opened in Acrobat?

Is the Acrobat DC Pro configured to always save documents as optimized? Compressed in any way during the saving process?

Is your Acrobat configured to open in reader view mode by default?

Has the product gone through recent updates? Upgrades? Fixes?

Have you tried resetting the product to its original defaults?

I am not sure if the following link applies to your case, but since you mentioned about the program behavior when disabling the OCR,

I would investigate a little more if anything related to the current Acrobat Distiller configurations.

acrodist.exe starting on its own and continuously hogging 1 cpu core

[Amal .]

Hi Davem,

I understand the situation, as described above you are not able to save the PDF file (50+ pages) as Adobe Acrobat DC takes a long time and freezes. We have recreated the issue at our end and the application is just working fine without any latency. For better understanding, we need some more information.

• What are the OS and the version you have?
• What is the content of the PDF file? Does it have more pictures and audio and video clips that make it heavier file?
• Are you on a work domain or on a home network?
• Are you trying to store it on your computer hard disk or on cloud-based storage like Google drive, Document cloud, Dropbox, etc?

In the meantime, you may try the following troubleshooting steps:

• Repair the installation, go to Help>Repair Installation, reboot the system and try again.

If that doesn't help, you may try to set the preferences

• Go to Edit>Preferences>General>Uncheck show online storage when opening files and >Uncheck show online storage when saving files.>Ok.
• Reboot the system and try again.

I hope this will fix the issue, keep us updated with the result.

Regards,

Amal

[Guest]

@ls_rbls

I'll go ahead and give those a look and attempt default settings along with a review of Distiller. The users aren't aware of any changes that were made.

@Amal .

Their machines are running Windows 10 Pro 64 Build 17763

The PDFs are scanned images only coming directly from their scanner.

They are operating on a domain network with no GPOs handling Acrobat.

This is occurring when saving to local and network shares.

I will attempt the suggested changes today and update accordingly. Thank you both.

[Test Screen Name]

Not sure why anyone would suggest you look at Distiller. It is involved in making PDFs, but has no involvement after that, and nothing to do with saving.

Does this happen if the file is local AND the save is local (ie no network involvement at all)?

[ls_rbls]

Yes Test Screen Name, I apologize if when I said to DaveM91:

"I am not sure if the following link applies to your case"... was not clear enough.

But now that you've place me in the 0.0000000000000000001 percent category of the "why would anyone" IT crowd, please allow me to elaborate:

At the time of my answer there was no prior knowledge that there was any network or domain involved as as a possible related issue.

Also, DaveM91 did mentioned some significant amount of increase in the file size when disabling the OCR settings.

Alrhough the OCR and the Distiller involve two separate processes when handling scanned documents there is still a form of file emulation that takes place when the it is configured to save as optimized. And that is definitely the Distiller parameters involved rigjt there.

To backup what I am saying, and to continue to help DaveM91, these are the references I found that could also help :

https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/how-to/ocr-software-convert-pdf-to-text.html

Can Distiller Run OCR

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2191204

How to on using OCR

https://collab.its.virginia.edu/wiki/toolbox/How%20to%20OCR%20a%20PDF.html

[Test Screen Name]

Distiller is not involved in the PDF Optimizer. This is complicated and the same settings may seem to apply in multiple settings - but it isn't involved. The Distiller settings were used as a model for other apps.

[ls_rbls]

Thank you for clarifying  and I stand corrected then.

I still don't understand why people in general refer to the Distiller as a completely separate thing and as something from the past when in fact it is still integrated with the current Adobe Acrobat.

[try67]

Very few people still use Distiller. It is a "relic" from the past when EPS files were more common and most applications didn't know how to create a fully qualified PDF file directly, or didn't want to. That's no longer the case, for the most part. Some industries (printing, DTP) probably still use EPS files as a part of a legacy workflow, so it's still included with Acrobat, but in most cases it's easier to just generate a PDF file directly, without this extra step in the middle.