Re: [Skim-app-users] Skim takes a long time to open large pdf files

[Rob R. <ry...@us...>]

So
On Nov 30, 2010, at 2:33 PM, Christiaan Hofman wrote:

> 
> On Nov 30, 2010, at 23:19, Rob Rye wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Nov 30, 2010, at 3:28 AM, Bill Shack wrote:
>> 
>>> On Nov 30, 2010, at 1:13 AM, Rob Rye wrote:
>>>> When running skim 1.3.10(59) under 10.6.5, I do not experience the sort of delays you describe. I just opened a 540 page pdf and was able to scroll immediately. Is it possible the problems you are facing are local to your machine?
>>> 
>>> I did notice that other users have not posted about this problem. It is good to have confirmation from other users that this may not be a general problem. I see it on both my MBP and my iMac.  I am running 10.6.4. I will try upgrading my system next week.
>> 
>> For what it is worth, I happened to have thumbnails off when I opened my sample 540 page document. Turning them on produced a delay on opening similar to what you reported. I had never noticed that delay before. So much for being an observant scientist...
>> 
>> Rob
> 
> For what it's worth, this was not the problem Bill Shack is having. And I doubt you will see *that* much of a slow down, because Skim never generates more thumbnails than it needs to display.
> 
> He seems to have some assistive app running that makes use of accessibility. That can slow down Skim initially, because it tries to extract all text in the main view, and in continuous scrolling mode (as opposed to 1-page or 2-pages mode) this can be quite a lot for large files, and PDF is pretty inefficient for extracting text, while PDFKit's accessibility implementation is pretty bad and inefficient. If you want to avoid that, you can avoid using assistive apps that make use of accessibility, you may turn off support for accessibility. You could also try to set the hidden pref for enhanced accessibility (see the Wiki for details). But you will lose 

Sorry. My error. I somehow got it in my mind he was talking about a few seconds slow down on opening. After reading your response I went back and looked at Bill's note again and saw he was seeing a minute or more delay. I never see that. Rather, I see opening times of a couple seconds on an i7 chip machine and up to 7 seconds on a Core Duo machine with a 500+ page document. While not instantaneous, that sort of opening time is certainly trivial compared to the time it will take me to read the document in question. 

Rob