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 Czekała]

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"?