Acrobat XI on MacBook Pro Retina down severely on scrolling PDFs

[Will_Parker1]

Hi all.

I've seen lots of threads around the net about slow scrolling on macbook and acrobat pro but having tried a few things I am compelled to ask myself for some help.

I have a Retina MacBook Pro 15" from Late 2012 and fully updated Mountain Lion (10.8.3), it has the solid state disk and I hit it with the cpu upgrade and ram upgrades on purchase.

For most applications it is gratifyingly fast - including, I should say much of the CS6 suite.

But when it comes to using PDFs in Acrobat XI it is really almost unusable.  The scrolling hesitation and interface lag for scrolling is horrendus.  It doesn't seem to matter too much if it is a big or small PDF in number of pages or size of images - ie pages of text that are rendered instead of text.

Sure, some of the PDFs I typically use are quite large and long. I am currently getting frustrated over one which is 690 pages but only 5 MB - another 300 pages and less than 2MB but they bog down something horrid.

And the most frustrating thing is that when I open them in Preview they scroll just as fast and cleanly as they do on my iPAD!!!

I have tried reinstalling, I have tried unchecking "run in 32bit" and I have looked at every internal setting I can find to no avail.

Can anyone suggest anything that might be causing it to be so sloooooow on this platform which should eat simple pdf viewing and annotating alive - (and I haven't even got the the point where I would be confident adding PitStop etc)

Best regards,

Will

[HelperBee2]

Thanks, Jon. I tried both ways (single page and scrolling) with identical results.

[g_miles]

Luc: Let me be very clear: Acrobat XI DOES NOT utilize full retina display resolution on the Mac.  Text and images, as well as the application menus etc are pixelated subpar. Not even close to the crispness of Preview or Skim.

[g_miles]

Even Microsoft managed to get Office 2011 HiDPI supported within a few months of the retina display release.  Adobe has yet to do that. I cant wait any longer and will look elsewhere.

[Jon__aka_nle_]

@g.miles

Do this:

1. Right click on "Adobe Acrobat Pro.app", and select "Get info".
2. Check if "Open in low resolution" is ticked (it was on my machine, and greyed out).
3. Untick and open the app.

If it is grayed out, do the following:

1. Make a backup of "Adobe Acrobat Pro.app".
2. Right click on "Adobe Acrobat Pro.app" and select "Show Package Contents"
3. Open "info.plist"
4. Add "<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key> <string>True</string>" at the bottom of the file, just before "</dict></plist>"
5. Save
6. Open the modified app package. Now everything should be crisp.

Worked for me!

BUT it seems to lag down the application alot – especially zooming. So it could be you want to have it ticked to gain performance, but now you at least have the option (i.e it is not greyed out).

EDIT:

I agree, this release is not up to par of what we should expect from Adobe.

[markbyrn]

Jon, you almost had it right.  It's "<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key><string>True</string>" and not "<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key> <string>True</string>"; the difference being there's a space that doesn't belong between </key> and <string> that shouldn't be there and won't work.  

Most unfortunate that Adobe hasn't fixed this bug; I had installed Acrobat XI fresh today on my new Macbook Retina 15" (no previous install) and it was low resolution by default.

[Steven_Yen]

Can you check your Acrobat 11 version is 11.0.4 or 11.0.0? HiDPI feature only support in 11.0.4. Please use Adobe/help/Update to update if you don't do it yet?

thanks

[markbyrn]

11.0.4 of course - I immeidately updated to the lastest version when I instsalled and I still had to manually edit the plist file to fix. 

[Steven_Yen]

This is a workaround so far:

1. Make a backup of "Adobe Acrobat Pro.app".
2. Right click on "Adobe Acrobat Pro.app" and select "Show Package Contents"
3. Open "info.plist"
4. Add "<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key> <string>True</string>" at the bottom of the file, just before "</dict></plist>"
5. Save
6. Open the modified app package.

[Steven_Yen]

1. Check the follwoing setting in info.plist:

/Applications/Adobe Acrobat XI Pro/Adobe Acrobat Pro.app/Contents/Info.plist

<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>

<true/>

if not set to true, change to true.

2. open terminal window and type the following

touch /Applications/Adobe\ Acrobat\ XI\ Pro/Adobe\ Acrobat\ Pro.app/

3. Check "open in Low Resolution" setting again.  

4. It should be turned on and uncheck

[AxelGarciaHenriksson]

Well, in my opinion Acrobat XI is now ok. It is not the fastest scrolling application, but it works. My benchmark is a 100+ pages pdf with 400+ comments, and scrolling OR stepping through the comments list now works - before the update that was totally impossible. Now, it even feel slightly faster than Acrobat X.

And the rendering is beautiful!

Something funny though - I cannot scroll the comments list by swiping my apple mouse. On the other hand - this caused extremely erratic scrolling in Acrobat X, and simply didn't work in XI. I haven't tried another mouse with a scroll wheel - maybe that works. Stepping through the list with arrow keys works though, which is enough for my production work flow.

[Luc_Leroy]

Hi,

Thanks for the positive feedback - good to read it works for most people!

AxelGarciaHenriksson wrote:

Something funny though - I cannot scroll the comments list by swiping my apple mouse. On the other hand - this caused extremely erratic scrolling in Acrobat X, and simply didn't work in XI. I haven't tried another mouse with a scroll wheel - maybe that works. Stepping through the list with arrow keys works though, which is enough for my production work flow.

What mouse are you using? We'll contact you in order to determine if it's a bug we can address.

Thanks

Luc

[AxelGarciaHenriksson]

Hi Luc,

I'm using the apple magic mouse. I cannot use the built-in trackpad on the MacBook Pro to scroll through the comment list either. On the other hand, if i scroll sideways, the whole comment list section, including scroll bar and comments, nudges sideways, but bounces back to it's original position. Funny. I suppose it is because it is not native UI controls being used?

Thank you,

Axel

[Luc_Leroy]

Hi Axel,

The comment list uses a different framework as you can see, and this is probably why the behavior is different.

A quality engineer should follow-up with you.

thanks again,

Luc

[Steven_Yen]

Hi Axel,

I can see you problem in my machine, I will log a bug for your issue so we can keep tracking this problem in our next quarterly releases.

Thanks for sending us the problem.

Acrobat QE, Steven;

[larsontw]

Somewhat related: Experiencing no scrolling in the comments pane using Magic Mouse, Mighty Mouse, or third party wired mouse. Very frustrating. (Adoba Acrobat Pro XI 11.0.4 on 2011 iMac, OS X 10.7.5). Other team members on Mac Pros experiencing same issue.

[Guest]

Gents, I also have a Macbook Pro Retina Display, I made the update to 11.0.04 and I still have slow scrolling. However, commenting is much better.

Some documents are worse than others, maybe because there are a lot of scientific references in the text that are actually links to the full reference at the bottom of the documents.

It is really painful to navigate in the document with this scrolling lagging.

Are there any other solutions?

[remillet]

I have the latest MacBook Pro 15" (Fall 2013) with 16GB and find the Adobe Reader (11.0.04) application one of the poorest performing applications I've used in years.  I'm very disappointed in the scrolling in particular.  It's laggy and choppy and very unsatisfying to use.  I really hope Adobe addresses this performance issue soon.  Perhaps their engineers can get some help from Apple's Developer support?

[Luc_Leroy]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback.

We are aware of this and have started an effort to improve power consumption and performance on Retina display Macs for Acrobat and Reader XI.

We'll keep you informed.

Best,

Luc

[Guest]

I hope they will update this soon as they talked they are going to do that in the first days of May.

[HelloHaggis]

Updating Acrobat right now. They released 11.0.07 today. I'm installing now but based on the release notes, appears they have addressed retina issues and scrolling. Figured I'd pass along the word before diving in to test, but everyone feel free to report your findings!

11.0.07 Planned update, May 13, 2014 — Acrobat and Adobe Reader Release Notes

[Jim_Pitre]

Just updated to 11.0.07 - BIG improvement on the scrolling issue - still not up to the level I'd like and not as good as Preview, but at least useable. Finally can use Acrobat more or less normally and not have to keep skipping back and forth between Acrobat & Preview to be able to get any work done. Bought XI in June of 2013 and have struggled and tried everything for over a year with a nearly unusable product - About time ! In addition have listened to the nonsense (crap) from many know-it-all "experts" that kept insisting that there was no problem and that I was doing something wrong.

Adobe, pull up your socks!