A Blog About Making Culture
Speeding up Adobe Reader
January 2, 2005
One of the most recurrently popular posts I've written was on Real Alternative, an application that is infinitely more tolerable than Real's official player when one has to endure a RealAudio or Video presentation.
In the same vein, I thought it would make sense to remind everyone of a similarly useful utility that, while not really a secret, is extraordinarily helpful in easing the pain of opening up Acrobat PDF files, Adobe Reader SpeedUp.
Sometime in the past few years, around when they inexplicably renamed Acrobat Reader to Adobe Reader, the good folks at Adobe made the application slow to a crawl when starting up. This problem is even more intolerable if you use the default settings on Windows and have PDF files load within the Internet Explorer browser as an embedded document. (Mac users: Yes, yes, I know OS X's built-in PDF reader is speedy. Don't care.)
Enter Reader SpeedUp. It's a simple little utility, and the steps it performs are ones you can do manually, but why bother? Essentially, Reader loads a huge number of plugins at startup, to enable all kinds of powerful and obscure functionality that nobody really takes advantage of except probably some giant insurance company's intranet. But since none of us use that for regular PDFs on the web, it can safely be disabled without causing any harm.
Like Real Alternative, SpeedUp doesn't even have a proper download page, it just lives on the site of the fellow who develops it. But if you're working with PDFs on Windows, it can make your experience a lot more pleasant.
Interestingly, Adobe's feature bloat and performance issues have opened up an opportunity for competitors, notably Macromedia's FlashPaper. Basically, Macromedia's tried to take advantage of the ubiquity of the Flash player to make a really lightweight formatted page display format that can let you make high-fidelity print copies of information without having a huge loadup time and while being able to embed the page within a regular HTML document.
Adobe Reader seems to be headed the other way, taking advantage of its ubiquity to start bundling the Yahoo Toolbar, indicating that they're headed towards making the application even bigger. I smell Adobe Reader Suite 2006.
But back to FlashPaper. I'm curious what the constraints are on the product's design. How does Macromedia plan to fight the demands for feature bloat? The primary selling point, despite all the benefits Macromedia lists, is that it's faster than Acrobat. Users are going to keep demanding "just one more little thing" until that's no longer true. FlashPaper might become a success despite its status as a relative unknown right now, but as the iPod demonstrates, fighting complexity on a product that's defined by its simplicity is a difficult struggle over time.
Previously: Goodbye San Mateo
My Whim Is Law
Tech Tuesday - speed it up, already..!: I hate it when links unexpectedly launch Adobe to view a PDF (and firmly believe that all links going to PDFs should be clearly labeled as such already.) Why? Adobe Reader is a big old honking bandwidth hog and takes... read more »jotsheet
Solution to slow-opening PDFs and Adobe Acrobat crashing your browser: Via Anil Dash, the solution to a long-standing annoyance of mine. Adobe is in a tight race with Microsoft for feature bloat, as evidenced by the ridiculous start-up time of Adobe Reader. Add to that the fact that viewing PDFs in your browser crashes th... read more »cdibona
You should check out sid steward’s pdf hacks, a recently released o’reilly book. It’s very good if you are slinging pdf.
Chris
Anil Dash 
Nice suggestion, Chris! Thanks for the link.
Neil T.
You may be pleased to know that the new Adobe Reader 7 is quite a bit faster than 6. Though it still installs a load of useless crap with it - Adobe would have been better allowing users to do a ‘custom’ install where they could disable things like the accesibility features which only those with screen readers actually need.
pb
Actually, Mac users should check out Schubert it’s PDF Browser Plugin which offers a much better experience than Preview and also supports Word docs: http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/
I think FlashPaper is missing the market since it doesn’t seem to be document-centric. I think PDF actually really fills a need of wanting to publish something as a “document”. FlashPaper seems to be oriented more towards being embedded in a web page which I think is much better handled with HTML in the vast majority of cases.
John Dowdell
“How does Macromedia plan to fight the demands for feature bloat? The primary selling point, despite all the benefits Macromedia lists, is that it’s faster than Acrobat. Users are going to keep demanding ‘just one more little thing’ until that’s no longer true.”
That’s a problem with any solution — it starts out targeted, but adds more features, which usually increases the learning costs for new users while simultaneously restricting the new areas a project can enter due to the needs for backwards-compatibility and user habits. Software growth is funny that way.
Macromedia FlashPaper’s real goals don’t include “being a better Acrobat”, although that’s apparently an attractive story hook for the media. The real thing driving this project is the need for regular knowledge-providers to have an easy way to get their materials to the web. (How else can you get a spreadsheet sample to the web? part of an MSWord piece? etc) That’s why the FlashPaper printer driver keeps the options simple and clear… the goal is to remove production problems, and reduction in audience hassle is more a nice byproduct.
Acrobat 7 does start faster, as promised by Bruce Chizen last year. I’m not sure what their adoption rate is… we know that 80% of consumers tested by Media Metrix can view at least some PDF, but the test file was an Acrobat 3.0 file, and I don’t know of version-to-version info on this plugin:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/
Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support
stavrosthewonderchicken
As Neil T mentions, Acrobat Reader 7 is much, much faster than 6. Even on old jalopy computers like mine. One of the few times I’ve seen bloatware actually reverse itself.
(Of course, in order to do this, it installs and stealth-loads a memory-resident speedup module on system start, which I hate. But I’m sold, if in fact you can be sold on free software.)
I also tried the Adobe Reader 6 speedup tool to which you link, a few months back, and I can vouch for the fact that 7 loads faster untweaked than a tweaked 6 did, at least on my PC. Which is good news all around.
vanderwal
I have been growing more accustomed to PDF, if they are built right, in the past couple of years. I still prefer (X)HTML hands down over anything else, as I can copy content out and repurpose it as I need. PDFs allow me to do nearly the same. I have not found a workable alternative to either of these. With PDF7 providing a very nice speed bump (one would swear Apple made the upgrade since it had improved speed) I am liking PDF more as an archiving technology for items I find on the web and sharing digital documents.
I am quite frustrated with FlashPaper as all the demos I tried did not permit copying content for reuse. This locked environment made it unsearchable as well. Converting MS Office products to FlashPaper never made sense to me.
As people are getting more sophisticated with their technology and the web, they are using tools to keep documents close to themselves (things on the web just disappear - occasionally for good reason like the content is out of date and has been replaced) as well as have annotated summaries of pieces they liked. The future allows the user to choose their use options, I am sticking to products that keep in line with this thinking.
John Dowdell
“I am quite frustrated with FlashPaper as all the demos I tried did not permit copying content for reuse.”
Hmm, that’s odd… can you not copy text in this FlashPaper document?
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashpaper/productinfo/overview/flashpaper_datasheet.html
This locked environment made it unsearchable as well.
Were you trying to use the in-Flash search engine, or a different external search engine…?
jd/mm
vanderwal
John, the FlashPaper demo you point to is a definite improvement, as one can perform copy and paste, but the lack of the ability to use keystrokes and the text keeping the line breaks when copied are annoyances (the keeping line-breaks is a huge annoyance).
The demo pages were on servers that were being searched on an enterprise Google appliance and an enterprise Verity search product (could have been UltraSeek). The FlashPaper content was not showing up in any of the search results after the pages had been scraped.
We have a fair amount of mobile users, which leads to a preference for (X)HTML based pages (they have problems with PDFs on many of their devices also).
John Dowdell
Sorry if I’m helping hijack Anil’s discussion here, but I need to follow up.
When I copy text from that FlashPaper document and paste into Notepad, I see a free-flowing text block, without extraneous linebreak insertions. Do you see differently when you paste into Notepad?
Or… maybe you *wanted* linebreaks inserted at wherever a linewrap happened to be? If so, then HTML doesn’t impose its formatting on the pasteboard in this way either, true? or…?
For searching, I’m not sure whether the Google Appliance supports all of the main Google functionality. You can confirm that the search engine finds text in SWFs through terms like “‘Banda Aceh’ filetype:swf”. I haven’t seen formal info on the capabilities of the various Verity engines, myself.
jd/mm
abhijit
There’s a faster (and cheaper!) way - From the folder ‘plugins’ (under c:programs..\adobe acrobat..) remove everything EXCEPT the following to a (new) ‘plugins_disabled’ folder - EWH32.api, printme.api, Search.api
That’s it!
vanderwal
John, I am now at home so I have my Mac, but I am seeing the same thing. I am copying (copy function does not work in Safari but does from FireFox) into BBEdit and turn on show invisibles in text options and I am seeing a hard return at the line ends. I had earlier copy and pasted into Word on a PC and repasted turning off all formating. I keep line wraps off in my text editors, for the most part. I am grabbing the center column of the link you posted above.
The Google appliance was a test box when FlashPaper first came out, so I am not sure what is in the current Google appliances that we now have. We have only one or two flash pieces on any of the servers that the Google boxes are scraping. The Verity servers have now all been replaced (everybody is happier for it).
scott
Does anyone know where the FlashPaper and Contribute installs the plugins, we want to remove them. Thanks in Advance.
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