Anil's Doublespeak: HOWTO: Speed up Acrobat Reader

»Monday, April 18, 2005

HOWTO: Speed up Acrobat Reader

Ever notice how Acrobat Reader loads a gazillion plugins when all you are trying to do is view a simple document? The easy way to fix that is to browse down to the plug_ins folder in your installation directory, and copy all the files and folders except EWH32.api and anything that says print/search to the folder named Optional. This will ensure a nearly instantaneous startup for your Acrobat Reader with no loss of functionality since the necessary plugins will still be loaded on the fly whenever they are needed.

Makes you wonder though - When Adobe built in the functionality that allows Acrobat to load the plugins whenever they are needed, why on earth did they set the default behavior to load all the plugins? I certainly feel no joy in watching Acrobat eat up all my memory just to display a simple document!

Tags: adobe, acrobat, tips

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Anonymous says..

Dude...this is ultra cool!

Avinash

[permanent link] on April 18, 2005 9:02 PM

Anonymous says..

good one, but pretty old stuff. It was being used when 5.0 was released.

[permanent link] on April 19, 2005 12:55 PM

Anonymous says..

Good stuff! But whats the point when most students need to open acrobat reader in one of the computing centers in ASU! (sob!)..maybe somebody needs to suggest this being done at the server itself or wherever the software is being ghost scripted(am i even making sense?)

[permanent link] on April 20, 2005 1:05 PM

Anil says..

I found this tip in a /. post, and it surely made my day. As the earlier comment mentioned, it helps only if you are using your own computer. On school/public computers you still have to deal with the incredibly bulky acrobat reader. I'm surprised that this feature has been available in so many prior versions of the reader (as someone mentioned, it does work even for version 5.0.. and we are at version 7.0 now) and Adobe sitll did not find it suitable enough to make it the default behavior!

Just take a look at the plugins that acrobat loads during startup:
weblink, updater, spelling, soap, sendmail, saveasRTF, picturetasks, legalPDF, ebook... Some software manager decided that all these should be loaded to allow these niche features to be used instantaneously when they are needed - never mind that the added bulk of all these plugins makes reader so slow that you are better served by an on-the-fly loading of plugins.

Just an example of how software can be created with no thought of how the user might want to use it.

[permanent link] on April 20, 2005 1:49 PM

dkjariwala says..

I had blogged about the same topic in 2003! My entry is here.

And I think the best solution for me is to use Adobe Acrobat 5.0. Yes, I think that was the last good version of Acrobat Reader and I use that! I have yet to see a PDF which I can not view using that version, so I am happy! :)

JD

[permanent link] on April 20, 2005 6:15 PM

Anonymous says..

Yeah thats right.....i love and still use Acrobat Reader 5....and it still has to say that it cannot open up a .pdf file....so so far so good...

[permanent link] on April 21, 2005 12:17 AM

Sachin says..

suppose i need X plugin to view some file, then is it sufficient to copy that plugin to plugin's folder?
will acrobat let me know that X plugin is not available when i try to open that file?
-sachin

[permanent link] on February 24, 2006 2:57 AM

Dennis Bareis says..

I have seen no evidence that the reader reads plugins on demand from the "Optional" directory. The readme in that location is vague and moving all plugins into this directory doesn't cause plugin loading as and when required (at least on my computer).

[permanent link] on January 17, 2007 4:54 PM