Slow PDFs

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi,

Some PDFs perform very, very slowly on the Mac. These PDFs scroll very slowly. If you simply do a “Save As…” using Preview, the resulting PDF file performs correctly. I don’t know why this happens, but, most of the PDFs that I download are slow, and, must be saved to work quickly and properly.

I have a Devonthink database that performs very slowly. I’ve come to realize that it is filled with these slow PDF files, which, probably need to be saved.

Is there any way to get Devonthink to peform a “Save As…” on every PDF file in its database?

Thanks in advance,
Andrew

2

The PDF documents use probably the PDF/X or PDF/A format and Mac OS X’s PDF engine (Quartz) is having a hard time displaying them. Saving the PDF documents via Preview converts them to the usual PDF format.

However, this shouldn’t affect the performance of the database as long as none of those PDF documents has to be displayed.

Finally, by default each database contains a smart group “All PDF Documents”. Just select its results (in small bunches), open them in Preview via Data > Open With > Preview and save them.