InDesign and PDF comments: extremely slow

[danielfeary]

Lately I've been doing a lot of publications and importing PDF comments into InDesign. But approving each change is extremely slow. Between 10–15 seconds for each one. Anyone else suffering poor performace? Anything can be done to improve this?

InDesign v14.0.3

MacOS 10.14.5

[BobLevine]

What are the rest of your system specs? RAM? SSD? Processor?
Have you tried InDesign 2020?

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Hi Daniel, 

Sorry to hear about the trouble you are facing with InDesign. I would request if you can share a few more details like:

1. Does this happen on a specific file?
2. Where are the files saved, locally or on any network or shared drive?
3. Do you use any third-party plugin?
4. Have you tried updating to the latest version which is InDesign 2020?

Regards

Rishabh

[danielfeary]

Just timed it: average time to accept a single word text change from PDF Comments tool is 23 seconds. As I have 430 text changes to make, almost three hours to accept these changes. It's a great tool but it's just not practical to use it currently.

1. This happens on several files in the last week.

2. The files are locally saved to the internal solid state drive

3. The only plug-in installed is APID ToolAssistant

4. Same issue with both 2019 and 2020 versions of InDesign

[BobLevine]

How much RAM do you have? What processor? Have you tried disabling the plugin?

[uniq1]

I'm sure you've never used this feature.

[meyrele]

Please, we are already in 2023, and we still have this problem, it's not a matter of processor, Raw, etc. We have a bug, and it happens on PC, MAC, new or old. I left files in the link (indesign.uservoice):

InDesign and PDF comments: extremely slow 

[Eliza5C49]

I am having the same issue and am working on a 530 page document. It's just too time consuming to work this way. I want to manually enter the edits but can't figure out how to remove the PDF comments from the document. Even without using the feature the document is dragging. Any thoughts?

[danielfeary]

@Eliza5C49 My tips would be remove any GREP styles in your paragraph styles. They seem to be the biggest factor towards the slow crawl of PDF changes. If you want to delete PDF comments, go to the PDF comments panel, click on the hamburger preferences icon, click "Delete All Comments". 

[Richard Groff]

I'm having problems with PDF Comments as well. I'm using CC19 on a 464-page book (my client needs it to stay in CC19, so I can't use 20 or 21 which, I hope, have better versions of this feature). After each "Accept" I have to wait about 10 seconds for the change to be made. The PDF Comments window occasionally freezes, so I have to close it, reopen it, and scroll back down to where I left off. Then at times the window starts scrolling down on its own and I can't stop it. Have to close the window and reopen it again. Pretty frustrating!

[uniq1]

Literally using this feature is a disaster.

[Richard Groff]

I gave up on using PDF Comments altogether. It's much faster to just have Acrobat open on one side of the screen and InDesign on the other.

[uniq1]

I wonder if the indesign team made an improvement for this?

[david najbrt]

No:(

[meyrele]

When will we have improvements to this feature. For God's sake, that would have to be a priority. He's amazing, but he's extremely slow with some markings.

[meyrele]

Look how long it takes! The video is longer than 8 minutes. And in each new version, this is slower. Text exchange markings are fast and effective, but markings with a geometric figure line take time and leave the computer locked, both on PC or MAC, new and old. Please this is very useful, but the way it is is making this feature unfeasible.

[Mateusz Czekala]

I agree. This is a great feature, but it's just not practical. Lags are so loooooooooooong. Adobe, you took our money – when will you fix this???

[Rafael Foigt]

For many years I had this problem, I used iMac, Macbook, M1, Intel and always had issues with display settings and performance, in high definition and low as well, but sometimes I noticed that it didn't slow down as much. I produce various magazines, and what left me wondering was that a 220-page magazine seemed to be less slow than a 64-page magazine. After various tests, I realized that files with more than 40, 50 pages, the PDF comments practically kill InDesign, after struggling I managed to solve it in the following way: I split the only 64-page file I had for the magazine into 4 files and combined them into an indb. Voilà, it worked! Try splitting your book files into several indd files and combine them into an indb.

[Stephan Moebius]

I am on a 64 page magazine and the PDF comment workflow is unusable. So the length of document is not it. It's also not the doing-changes operation that is slow, it's the selection/highlighting/jumping to entries in the PDF-comments pannel that's unusably laggy. I have this on one slightly older but still quite fast Windows10 machine and one extremly fast modern Windows 11 Workstation. To me it felt like the problem appeared with one of last updates in 2023. Before that i was using this workflow intensivly for years and it was brilliant. Reading this thread, it seems the trigger for the problem seems to lie elsewhere. Maybe its the way the comments are done in the PDF-Document. Maybe it's something to do with the "Users"?

[friedrichl59758051]

I have the same Problems on modern enviroment (M1 Mac).  Working on large Indesign-Files (500pages+, no Book Splitting) was good and fast before 2023 Versions. The Problem clearly comes in 2023, before it was fine.

Therefore, I am shure, it has nothing to do with RAM, GREP-Styles and so on.

In my case – it only slows down, when the comments are made with the normal comment-Tool in Acrobat (Speach-Bubble-Symbol) and when the Comments-Symbol is located over a Text-Box.
When working with the specific Comment-Text-Tools (marked Text, delete Text, insert Text …) then, everything ist ok.

Maybe – that helps someone…

[MARTYNB]

On a 100+ Annual Report.  Have a latest and greatest MacBook Max and it's just as bad as my old iMac Pro thats 5+ years old.  The problem definitely seems to be with the sticky note/comment tools.  Went back to the PDF and deleted out all the sticky notes, leaving just insert text and delete text/strikethrough and worked like a breeze after that.

[Gabriel Menezes]

I had the same problem. In fact, speed decreases greatly depending on the variety of types of comments: yellow text boxes and geometric shapes (drawings) greatly worsen performance. The use of filters in indesign was also slow, as the window seemed to slowly reorder the comments each time a comment was resolved.

— In Acrobat you can filter comments by TYPE and exclude the most problematic ones. This way you will have a file with just the text changes to import into indesign.

As already mentioned, the tool has great potential, but its use still needs to be improved a lot.

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Hi,

We're so sorry to hear about the trouble. Would you mind sharing a few more details like:

1. The version of InDesign & OS.
2. System configuration.
3. Is this happening with a specific file or multiple files?
4. Please try reproducing the issue and take a screenshot of the Task Manager/Activity Monitor capturing InDesign Process.
5. Where are the files saved, locally or on any network drive or shared folder?

We're here to help, just need more details.

Thanks

Rishabh

[MARTYNB · Accepted solution]

Bang on.  Deleted all the sticky notes and it flew.  Thanks for this Gabriel!  And I agree, sort it out Adobe! This must be driving loads of pro users crazy on what could be (and was once) a great tool

[ShaneWinfield]

I have this same slow issue. I'm on a 2019 27-inch iMac with 3Ghz 6-core Intel with 32GB memory. My system in Ventura 13.6.4

I've had this issue for months and updating Indesign or my system software has NOT helped at all. I really like the idea of using PDF comments but it is so slow, I'm better off printing them off and doing my changes the old-fashioned way with the printed text and a highlighter. Acrobat is so slow and the inability of Indesign to use the PDF comment tool quickly makes this a useless feature.

As soon as I delete the PDF comments Indesign speeds up and works fine so the problem is with PDF comments.