Q: Annoying slowness of Preview after Yosemite upgrade

So, I stumbled across something that made a significant improvement.  I had the same issue as described with PDF rendering in Preview (since the Yosemite upgrade) that was unbearably slow.  I turned off Smooth Text and Line Art (in the Preferences->PDF menu) and this helped significantly.  I still feel that Preview is a little sluggish, but this is usable.  I can imagine that you might find a document that unchecking this could degrade the quality of the fonts/art rendering, but so far for me I haven't found this.  And, now I can go back to using Preview...

I'd be curious to hear if this helps out others.

Thanks dad_darm, well of course it helps to turn off Smooth Text and Line Art in the Preferences, and as a workaround it's OK, but then again, actually we are Mac-Users because we like to have good quality, like we had before with Mavericks.

What also helps to speed up everything a bit:

Delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist

Delete ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver*.plist

Shutdown OSX

Startup, immediately press and hold the P and R keys while holding down the option (⌥) and command (⌘) keys before the gray boot screen appears, which resets the PRAM

Again: no solution, but at least a step in the direction so that we can work again with our machines (without having to go back to Mavericks).

BTW, I just installed 10.10.2, still the same problem argh, maybe I'll have to go back to Mavericks…

the only operating system in the history of the earth that cannot read pdf files

including Windows,Android,Tizen,Web os,ubuntu,palm,firefox  and others

great job Tim!

at the same time Tim Cook wins CEO of the year award!

I can't believe Apple haven't fixed this yet. I'm on the verge of selling my Mac and switching back to Windows.

if you can find a buyer who is interested in a laptop that cannot read pdf files let us know

maybe apple terminates support for pdf files (and files generally)

"angry birds" and "cut the rope" professional machine we have bought!

maybe apple terminates support for pdf files (and files generally)

Apple has not terminated support for pdf files. I've been running Mavericks and Yosemite on my machines and simply cannot replicate the problem; if I could, I would have submitted a bug report.

PDF files work just fine in Mavericks. In Yosemite, the problem seems to occur with certain PDFs but not with others. I believe it affects PDFs that originate from scanned files, and is made worse by annotations or notes in the file. For someone who works with PDFs on a daily basis, the problem has been extremely aggravating. I've installed Yosemite fresh multiple times and tried it from multiple user accounts, but can't fix the problem.

Anyway, like I said, I think I have no choice but to switch back to Windows. I'm frankly upset that Apple has let the problem persist for this long. I've certainly submitted bug reports.

maybe we must buy babowa's machine which works flawlessly.Babowa do you have a windows pc?

the issue is on our machines which run OS X

I am experiencing the same problem.

Preview used to be a very stable application. After upgrading to Yosemite however scrolling has become very slow for large pdf files; the application regularly 'freezes' for a few seconds.

Moreover, the annotation features do not always work. Sometimes the 'T' button (for inserting text) is irresponsive.

STILL no fix for this issue in 10.10.2

I keep submitting feedback, bug reports, Genius Bar apps, etc. but no help. Everybody keep sending feedback to Apple and hope that enough people get their attention with this issue. I'm very concerned that we've gone through two point updates and this is still an issue. I don't think it's on the Apple fix radar.

I finally upgraded to Yosemite a few days ago and have the same problem with bigger PDF files. I discovered two solutions. None of the the other solutions posted on this and similar threads worked for me.

1) Use Adobe Acrobat Reader instead. It seems to work better speed-wise, but of course, it's interface and functionality leave a lot to be desired.

2)  (***Not for the faint of heart***)... Replace PDFkit framework with the one from Mavericks. Here's how:

     a) BACK UP your system!!!!

     b) Go to /System/Library/Frameworks/Quartz.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks

     c) Copy PDFKit.framework to somewhere else on your computer for safe keeping in case you need to replace it. This is version 3.1 in Yosemite.

     d) In the same folder on a Mavericks system, make a copy of the PDFKit.framework file. This should be version 2.9.2 in Mavericks.

     e) Replace the file in folder (b) with the Mavericks version (d)

     f) Restart the computer

So far, this has been working for me. Preview is back to normal speed. It's only been a short while and there's always the chance that this will break something else that I haven't found yet. If you do this, make sure you have a way to go back (reinstalling Yosemite would be one way).

Is there a way to just install this one component without having to download the entire Mavericks installer, finding a hard drive to install it and then re-copying the one component back to my Yosemite installation? Or is there somewhere online where one could download the individual framework?

Richard, thanks for the suggestion. I had previously taken option #1, which at least made my computer usable again. I extracted PDFKit from an old Mavericks VM, and everything seems to be working great so far. I'll post further results once I've had a chance to use the old framework more.

It's certainly a band-aid solution until Apple finally gets around to fixing this, but it's a welcome solution nonetheless.

Seann, sorry, but I doubt there is any place you could legitimately grab it. I suspect that if somebody posted a link here, it would be summarily removed by the moderators.

Sorry Seann, I searched a bit and didn't find anywhere that it is posted. I won't post it for fear of being charged with copyright infringement. So I guess you'll have to do an install and extract it from there.