Slow PDF Viewing in Yosemite

I've got a Mac Pro 13" (2012). Quite impossible to deal with big pdf files using Preview :-(

Same problem here (Mid 2012 rMBP, 8GB RAM). I ended up installing the Windows Version of Acrobat Reader via Wineskin Winery which is displaying the pdfs without any problem.

Ok so it's been more than 2 months now since I was one very frustrated user and wrote a post in these forums. I work with hundreds of PDFs a week so any Preview nuisances are unbearable. I tried a few third party PDF software as a desperate last resort, but found them sluggish and slow to load compared to a native application. Preview has worked flawlessly for me for the last 7 years up to this upgrade.

I'm really happy to report that Preview has generally been problem free for me in the past couple of months! And in general the whole OS has been performing a bit more speedy without giving me noticeable headache.

What I've done is follow some of the users' advice here, and do two things:

1. Preferences > General > Show scroll bars > Always
(Have scroll bars always turned on)

2. Preferences > Accessibility > Display (on the left) > Reduce Transparency (checkmark is on) > put the scale on 'Normal'
(Turn off the transparency feature so colours don't bleed through)
I think these two things somehow takes up more RAM than need be an they really serve a minuscule margin of form and add no function whatsoever.
Hope it helps some.

Paradoll wrote:(sic)

What I've done is follow some of the users' advice here, and do two things:

1. Preferences > General > Show scroll bars > Always
(Have scroll bars always turned on)

2. Preferences > Accessibility > Display (on the left) > Reduce Transparency (checkmark is on) > put the scale on 'Normal'
(Turn off the transparency feature so colours don't bleed through)

These steps helped me! I have a brand-new MBP 13" 2.9GHz 8MB RAM (Yosemite 10.10.2) with scrolling slowness - "sticking or stutters" in Preview as well as in Safari (8.0.3). These steps have solved the problem with scrolling in Safari as well!

Well, almost- there is a little bit of lagging if I "scroll hard" with the inertial scrolling, like trying to make it to the top of the document with a large swipe. If I only try to get to the next page or two it seems to work normally.

In addition, I noticed that now instead of it "sticking," it loads the text of the PDF document slower, meaning it shows me the page BEFORE it is loaded, whereas before the above "fix" (this is a work-around APPLE!) it wouldn't show me the text until it is loaded. Perhaps this is a clue to the problem, as is the "rate" or "force" of inertial scrolling? Come on all you tech-savvy folks, solve this! Thanks Paradoll!!!

Im using Yosemite 10.10.3 and the problem with Preview remains, lag everywhere when try to open big pdf file, or complex ones.

Still the same problem for me.

I moved to Acrobat.

It's such a pity they have not fixed it yet.

Same problem !

upgraded to 10.10.3

performance is much better on my macbook pro 2010

Now it's really usable!

Don't remember where I found this solution, but running this works for me. I do find that I have to run it every so often (possibly after updates). I'm on 10.10.3 and just had to run it to return speed of preview to its former self.

sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force

Sorry this did not help.

I have not found the solution so far.

Except Acrobat to replace Preview and Firefox to replace Safari...

It really looks like this version is Fubar.

Still sluggish

Try this http://support.mekentosj.com/discussions/problems/79775-painfully-slow-scrolling -in-some-papers

Anyone using 10.10.4 have test Preview with big PDF files?

Yea it is still messed up. Really thinking about switching to Windows since I think I'm going to Android and my laptop is getting old.

Yes, they have completely messed-up this version. Incredible.

- Spotlight opens in a small window, impossible to resize (?)

- Preview slow to open large pdf files (? again)

Has anybody tried to disable Spotlight ? It looks like the slowness comes from the fact that

Spotlight may reindex the file while Preview opens it. Just a guess.

My advice: install Acrobat. And Firefox.

I have OSX 10.10.3 and PDF scroll is sluggish on my 2014 MBP 15. But... on some zoom levels its ok! So to fix the problem I have to zoom in and zoom out several times to find the best drawing for smooth scroll. This is ridiculous.