Participant

Answered

Acrobat XI on MacBook Pro Retina down severely on scrolling PDFs

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
June 4, 2013
6 replies
36983 views

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

Install update and subscribe to Acrobat

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Luc_Leroy

How do we get this message to the developers? Viewing pdf files on a retina display mac with Acrobat XI is totally unacceptable at this time

I'm sorry it doesn't work for you, and if I write we support Retina Display, it because we do

You shouldn't have to change the info.plist to support retina display (unless you've messed-up with a previous install to try to make it support retina display like it is proposed to do for MS Office on certain web sites).

Menus, toolbars, dialogs... are all rendered at full resolution and if other users confirm that, then maybe you should question yourself about this instead of accusing Adobe of shipping non Retina compliant software...

Jon brings a good point asking you to check the plist file. Even Acrobat 11.0.03 supports Retina display (in the UI only, not the document view) so there is NO WAY you get pixelated menus with a regular install.

BTW - on a different thread I've asked you to double check that you're running 11.0.04 and eventually provide a screen shot. I'll be happy to help if you truly have an issue. LEt me know if you need someone from Adobe to provide you with some support.

Thanks,

Luc

A

Anonymous

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

H

HelloHaggis

Participating Frequently

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

J

Jim_Pitre

Known Participant

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!

L

larsontw

Participant

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.

A

Anonymous

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?

R

remillet

Participant

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?

A

AxelGarciaHenriksson

Participant

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.

L

Luc_Leroy

Inspiring

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

A

AxelGarciaHenriksson

Participant

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

Maarten Deckers

Participant

Can't believe it's taking Adobe this long to come up with a solution! Acrobat has been useless for months now, yet I'm still paying for my CC subscription. What's up with the acclaimed "Immediate access to new features and updates"?

C_F_McBlob

Inspiring

The September 2013 update for Reader and Acrobat will have Retina compatibility changes.

G

g_miles

Participating Frequently

Just updated; the problem remains unchanged and Adobe has yet to correct it. Adobe, this has gone on too long.

A

AxelGarciaHenriksson

Participant

I am happy to read that Adobe is adressing this issue.

I can confirm that it is the 'retina' display rather than the computer that is the issue - I use the same computer as Will but with an external 'non-retina' display. Acrobat is fast on the external display, slow on the internal one. 'Non-osx-native' graphics, like the comments list, is even slower. Acrobat 10 is in my experience faster, albeit no race winner.

S