362 Rendering Speed

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PHK
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362 Rendering Speed

Post by PHK »

Has something been done in V.362 to improve rendering speeds? My larger multi-page merged sheets seem to be taking less time to render and I am maxxing-out less frequently on the too-big ones?
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FringePhil
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, PHK

As always, we try to improve the speed and stability of basic functions slightly with every build, sometimes they are small enough changes that you cannot notice, and sometimes they will be more obvious improvements.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

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I don't know how I imagined that rendering speed was improved in v. 362. Let's put it down to wishful thinking. Because now I am having huge problems with rendering in v. 364.

I am using a fairly well-equipped newish PC with Win 11 installed. I have a file with over 400 pages, slightly under 4 Mb, that I am trying to get down to a reasonable size by merging pages onto fewer sheets, for instance 40 to 60 pages onto one sheet. In the process, I will often merge 2 or 3 pages vertically and use the Split Pages function followed by another vertical merge without the blank sections to cut out useless acreage to get one single compact sheet of those 2 or 3 pages. Then, I merge these pages horizontally to get a ribbon of pages on to a single sheet. I elect to not delete the merged pages for the moment until I am happy that the merged-pages sheet was what I want/don't want. Then I save the file. That all works reasonably well except when it comes to viewing this new sheet. The screen freezes with the spinning blue bagel of hell. Eventually, the sheet will render; many minutes later. This is very annoying.

I note that if I open the same file in Acrobat downloaded from The Cloud on my lowly iPad it works perfectly well albeit after a little time to download and render. But I can navigate around the large sheet, zooming in and out, etc. It even works on my Android smart phone if I give it a little time to render, but it needs less time than PDF-XCE.

Surely, this should not be right. Viewing a PDF should not be easier on a phone than it is on a big PC running PDF-XCE.

I feel let down by PDF-XChange that, with all its advanced features, can't handle the simple, but essential task of rendering a PDF page visible.
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FringePhil
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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by Paul - Tracker Supp »

Hi PHK,

you are not going to like this; I think we need the file so as to look inside and see what is going on. It's next to imposible to say without first hand knowledge of the internals of the document.

I assume you have tested making a copy using "Save As Optimized" to see if it can remove unused artifacts? I an just guessing, but sometimes we see strange things in documents like tens of thousands of unused named destinations or other leftovers from things done throughout the document's history. Save As Optimized can sometimes help there.

If not and you want to upload the file we would be happy to take a look. If it's sensitive you can email it to us.

cheers
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Paul O'Rorke
Tracker Support North America
http://www.tracker-software.com
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PHK
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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by PHK »

Paul - Tracker Supp wrote: Mon Oct 24, 2022 7:58 pm ...
I assume you have tested making a copy using "Save As Optimized" to see if it can remove unused artifacts? ...
SA Optimized greatly reduces the size of the file [3>1] but does not solve the rendering problem.

As you might have guessed, the file is sensitive...I'll have to think long and hard on that one.
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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, PHK

It would be very helpful to see the file, we will certainly handle it with the utmost discretion and delete our copy of it as soon as we have finished troubleshooting. If you do decide to send it over, please provide the file via email, not on this public forum, for security. As you know, our email address is support@pdf-xchange.com

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by PHK »

It is not a particular file; there are several where I experience this problem.

I understand and support your request for specific files and I will try to find the least sensitive one to forward.

Would sending a cloud link via e-mail work?
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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, PHK

Certainly, that would likely be easier, as there would be no copy kept on our end except on the device which we download it directly to, and you could remove the cloud link once we confirm we have it.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by PHK »

I am beginning realize that my aggressive splitting and merging pages is the root cause of my problems above. Perhaps naively, I thought I could do that without consequences. This is quite disappointing. Ideally, I would like to compress multi-page folders down to significantly fewer sheets of merged pages but retaining all the content of the source pages but with the features and flexibility PDF-SCE provides for files populated with unmerged pages.
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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, PHK

Yes, repeat merging and splitting would definitely cause issues for any document that contains "layers" or "named destinations, as these items are always copied during those operations (resulting in rapid exponential growth if done to the same document repeatedly). We are working on control options to prevent this in the future, but as of right now, the best I can suggest is opening the panes for layers and named destinations and deleting them from the file.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by PHK »

TrackerSupp-Daniel wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2022 3:44 pm ...
Yes, repeat merging and splitting would definitely cause issues for any document that contains "layers" or "named destinations, as these items are always copied during those operations (resulting in rapid exponential growth if done to the same document repeatedly). We are working on control options to prevent this in the future...
I am glad to know that albeit unhappy that this has not been previously disclosed and unhappy that the limitation exists.
TrackerSupp-Daniel wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2022 3:44 pmthe best I can suggest is opening the panes for layers and named destinations and deleting them from the file...
Just to be clear, are you advising complete deletion of all Layers and Destinations in such files? I am not resistant to that as it is clear that Destinations do not survive well page merges and usually need to be reset, although my ideal would be for Destinations to be robust and page-merge survivable. I don't quite know why Layers are a problem but that is almost certainly above my technical pay grade.
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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, PHK
PHK wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2022 6:04 pm Just to be clear, are you advising complete deletion of all Layers and Destinations in such files?
That is indeed what I am suggesting. Because any destination or layers exiting will be duplicated EACH time you merge (assuming that you are splitting the content out of the document before that merge), rapid exponential growth can occur if any exist, and you do not manually maintain them with each action.
If you have 100 either of these, then each subsequent merge would lead to 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, etc. Once you reach a few tens of thousands of either (which only take a few more steps in that chain) most users will start to see a slowdown.

As an alternative, avoiding splitting and merging would be a better option, In most cases if you need to split content and then re-merge it back in, it would be easier to simply move the pages around, or delete those you do not need and add new pages you do, without any extraction going on, would it not?

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by PHK »

TrackerSupp-Daniel wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2022 6:17 pm
As an alternative, avoiding splitting and merging would be a better option, In most cases if you need to split content and then re-merge it back in, it would be easier to simply move the pages around, or delete those you do not need and add new pages you do, without any extraction going on, would it not?
Well, yes, it might be "easier" but an "easier" process is not my desired result. I am sorry if I am trying to go beyond the lazy approach and am more concerned about the final product produced even if it requires a bit more effort. The potentially-fabulous aspect of PDF-XCE is the ability to get away from the prosaic, legacy, rigid, pre-established format of "pages" which is simply a perpetuation of a format that arose from the requirement to convey information on physical pieces of paper. This is no longer necessary and I see no reason to continue this formating in perpetuity. In a hundred years from now, people will laugh at the Letter and A4 format constraints. My car does not have a buggy whip. Nor do I see why I must live with thousands of individual A4/Letter Size virtual pages when there is almost the ability to have the page size fit the content rather than the other way around. I would expect an alert software company interested in smart data management to look for ways to give its clients a way to do the former, forgetting the latter.

This fabulous aspect should be, in my view, the ability to assemble data into a presentation which focus on content that is relevant and shucking that visual noise that is irrelevant and which tends to be present on paper-page-formatted presentations. PDF-XCE comes close to doing this with the Merge Pages and Split Pages capabilities. However, if PDF-XCE is not able to do that without crashing the program, we are not quite there.
TrackerSupp-Daniel wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2022 6:17 pm That is indeed what I am suggesting.
I am not finding that to help. I have tried this on a problem file that I have submitted through Paul to the devteam and it made no difference to the way PDF-XCE handled the file whatsoever. Let's wait to see what the techs come up with.
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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, PHK

In that case we will just have to wait and see.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Re: 362 Rendering Speed

Post by Paul - Tracker Supp »

Well the guys have found that we can improve how we handle the complex internal structure of this PDF. I am told there is a lot of nested data that we can do better accessing.

I have raised the associated support request ticket, RT#6284: Editor freezes when opening and modifying, things are happening...

;)
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Paul O'Rorke
Tracker Support North America
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