Slow Skim

I’ve tried Googling for instances of this problem, but can’t find anyone else who’s having it. Skim, a PDF reader-cum-annotator for Mac OS X, reads some PDFs, particularly (it seems) PDFs from JSTOR, painfully slowly. Top tells me that when I’m scrolling through a JSTOR PDF with Skim, Skim occupies up to 80% of the CPU. Skim’s annotation system is signficantly superior to Preview’s annotation system pre-Leopard, but its slowness might just compel me to return to the much leaner Preview. I’m using Tiger 10.4.11 on a 2GHz, 512MB RAM Macbook. There seems to be no reason why Skim should need so much of my CPU.

Late Update
: It turns out this is because JSTOR encrypts all its PDFs and Apple’s PDFKit is slow at decoding that encryption. No solution, sadly.

4 Responses to Slow Skim

  1. Those pdf’s (if I remember right) have both image layer and text layer in them, I think? Maybe it is this that what causes trouble, and that turning off image layer will help? (This is just a wild guess, I never used Skim. Nor MAC for that matter)

  2. Michael McCracken says:

    Hi, Skim uses the same PDF reading and display code as Preview.
    It should be the same speed – It’s basically Preview plus a bunch of features that don’t affect rendering speed much. If reading PDFs is much slower than Preview, that’s probably a bug and I’m sure that the Skim devs would be glad to hear a full report on the users list:
    http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/mailingLists.html

  3. Alex says:

    I have precisely the same problem. Please let me know if you find a solution or a work-around.

  4. Ryan says:

    Why can’t apple fix pdfkit to deal better with the JBIG2 compression? This is really frustrating. I get almost all my papers from JSTOR and reading them is unbearably slow!!!!!

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