Acrobat Professional cache entire document?

[BrianLeybourne]

We use the Adobe CC suite in-house. Some of our guys work on really massive PDF's, they can get up to hundreds of megs and use lots of multimedia images etc in them.

Most documents are fine, but some of them are so big they're really slow. If you go from page 1-2-3-4-5 etc, it's fine, because the page cache pre-caches the pages one ahead and one behind of where you are. But if you want to ad-hoc jump around the document, it's painful because it has to then load the page you jumped to AND the one before and after it, so it takes ages. Then you jump to another page and it does the same thing again, etc.

It seems to me there should be a way to tell Adobe pro to just load the whole document initially, so there would be no problem with jumping around the pages. Our machines have 8/16gb of ram, there's no problem with doing so, but I can't find out how to do it. My google-fu is failing me.

'Does anyone know how to force adobe pro to precache entire documents? Is there a way? I don't want to tell the users they have to download the documents into a ramdrive or similar if I can avoid it.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

No, there is absolutely no way to force Acrobat Pro (there is no such product as “adobe pro”) to pre-cache entire documents. Even for the MacOS version which is 64-bit and can use the entire 64-bit address space, this is not possible. (One of these days we will hopefully see a 64-bit version for Windows as well!)  Be aware that caching is not simply a matter of reading the entire PDF file into a contiguous portion of virtual memory. It's much more complex than that including decompression and interpretation of the actual PDF file contents. There is a big compromise between time-to-display-first page and caching an entire PDF file. This is not at all simple to implement. And even if such a feature was implemented, any performance gains would be very configuration and PDF file content-dependent.

            - Dov

[BrianLeybourne]

Thanks Dov, I appreciate the reply. There are other PDF reader/editor products that can precache, and as such they handle large complex files a lot more smoothly than Acrobat Pro does. I would rather stick with CC, but I'm getting pressure to purchase one of these other products. I'm astonished to learn that the company who invented the PDF standard doesn't have a product that can do (some) things as well as other PDF editors. That's disappointing.

Still, thanks again for the really swift response. I hope you have a great xmas!

[hpconst]

The only thing I've found that helps is to use the organize pages feature to veiw all the pages at once.  Turn up the thumbnail size all the way.  Seems like a step towards what we need.  I've been screwing with settings for an hour with no benefits.  Running 120+ GB ram and pretty decent midrange graphics card.  Stupid that I can run full 3d games faster than a set of construction plans...