Newbie: the pdf pages dont come up quickly

[dannyd456]

Hi all
I am not great on computers and new to scribus.  I have started to use it to make a brochure (rather than powerpoint) and am half way through.  When i save the document as a pdf it seems fine.  then when i open the pdf each of the pages appears on the screen slowly. very slowly in fact. 

If i scroll through to the 8th page for example it is blank for ages, whilst its thinking, then the stuff pops up.
I have tried reading up on page rendering and not got anywhere at all.

i enclose my pdf so you can see what i mean
i assume there is something i am doing wrong and i can just click on some buttons to make it all go fast (when i save it from scribus i mean)

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[GarryP]

Welcome to the forum dannyd456.

I don't know what the brochure is supposed to look like but what I can see loaded and displayed pretty much instantly for me in Acrobat Reader DC.

The problem could be a lot of things but I don't think it's with Scribus - unless I'm not seeing what I'm supposed to be seeing.

There's not much you can do in Scribus to affect load and display in PDF readers or, at least, nothing that would mean much of a difference in a document of this size.

I did notice that the text is not selectable and there are no fonts embedded. This makes me think that you have outlined all of the text. Doing so can sometimes make rendering a bit slower than normal text but for this amount of text it shouldn't make much of a difference.

The first thing I could suggest is trying a different PDF reader, preferably the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader - https://acrobat.adobe.com/uk/en/acrobat/pdf-reader.html - which is the one that Scribus is tested against.

The next thing would be to check your computer's memory availability. If your computer has a small amount of RAM and you have a lot of applications open then that can make things slow down a lot. How you do this would depend on what sort of operating system you're using - Windows, OS X (Mac) or Linux (or something else).

By the way, from what I have seen so far, the brochure is looking nice. I realise it's not finished yet but what I see is a good start.

[dannyd456]

Thanks GarryP, very kind of you to come back so quickly.

So, i already have PDF reader DC on my computer and the pdf opens perfectly and runs perfectly quickly (i.e. it all pops up on the screen quickly).  So i know it works, and my computer is fine.  I used to have the font embedded, but read an article which said it all renders faster if you dont - so i took them out.

So, this is the problem.  when i just open the pdf, it opens in a programme which just has a blue e, i assume its a windows thing thats like google (possibly explorer).  i assume that if i were to email my pdf brochure to anyone (friends, clients, etc).  They would just click on the pdf in the email and it would open up on their computer.  Just like it does on mine.  Well.  Then it would automatically open up in "e" (if thats explorer) and wouldnt work properly.

So, I guess the next question is, how do i get the pdf to open and work on a normally set up computer - which is what the people i will be sending it to - have?  everyone i send the end brochure to will have windows (word, powerpoint, xls) and so i assume the "e" set up on their computer too?

Danny

[utnik]

hi danny

this blue 'e' is the 'internet explorer' (the standard web browser on windows computers).
in normal configurations a .pdf file won't open in a web browser. you (or someone else) must have told your computer to open .pdf files in this browser. (might have been an unnoticed click while installing a .pdf viewer plugin...)

unfortunately i don't have the internet explorer for testing, but i opened your file in four different web browsers and three other viewers - all of them displayed the file without a noticeable processing time.

utnik

[GarryP]

I've just tried opening the document in Internet Explorer, Edge (Internet Explorer's replacement), Google Chrome and TeXWorks and there's no noticeable rendering lag in any of those; certainly nothing that I would say was a problem.

(I'm not 100% certain about embedded fonts being quicker to render than vector glyphs but I don't think the difference would be noticeable except in extreme circumstances either way, so that's probably something that can be ignored.)

On issue is that there's no such thing as a "normal" computer set-up. You can't know what software people have on their machines or how they want to read stuff. For example, they might want to use a certain application to read PDFs because it has a good text-to-speech function (which is another good reason for embedding fonts). Plus, you cannot know that everyone who reads the document will have Windows; they might be using a Mac or be running Linux (or something even more "exotic").

I don't think there's a whole lot you can optimise in the document as it is and I don't think the problem is with Scribus. (It could be, but I can't see how.)

I'm not seeing the problem that you're seeing so I can't really give better advice I'm afraid.
Maybe someone else coming to the forum later might have seen exactly the same problem and knows what to do about it.

[dannyd456]

Ok, then brilliant.  Thank you very much.
I am going to complete my brochure.
Assume that i am getting it right - i can check using my pdf reader, so will be fine.
Then hope that not too many other people have somehow got their computer opening pdf files with "internet explorer".
i will send it off to some people to see.

I have no idea why my laptop uses "internet explorer" to open things, i think it was like that, so i assumed everyone had it like that.  thanks for the information.  I was assuming that IT departments in companies would also use the "internet explorer" and so the rendering issue would be a problem for most "business people" in the world.

Thanks for your help.

[Nermander]

In Adobe Reader in the Settings/Preferences (not sure what it's called in the English version, my version is in Swedish) there is a button to make Reader the default PDF application.

[GarryP]

In Acrobat Reader DC, you can make it the default PDF viewer via menu "Edit -> Preferences / General" and pressing the "Select as Default PDF Handler" button at the bottom of the panel.

In Windows, you can also: Right-click on any PDF; select "Open With -> Choose another app"; select the application you want from the pop-up; check the "Always use this app to open .pdf files" box; and then OK the pop-up.

P.S. It might be worth providing a link to the Acrobat Reader download page in your email as a surprising number of people don't already have it installed and might not know what it is. Note that Acrobat Reader isn't readily available for Linux machines - it's installable but most general users won't have the knowledge to do so - but most Linux distributions come with their own PDF reader.

[LesCM19]

I had trouble with Acrobat Reader, especially when 'the big computer' wasn't available and I ended up using a low spec netbook.

Netbook doesn't have any display/scrolling problems using Foxit Reader, however.