Acrobat Reader 6.0, as it ships by default, is an utter and total pig. Takes forever to start, eats great gobs of memory, and its search capabilities are, for simple searches, significantly sub-par relative to old versions.
News from MacOSXHints is that a lot of the gook can be turned off, and you can actually get Acrobat 6.0 to load faster and slimmer than 5.x by turning off most of the plugins. (To the point where it launches in about a quarter the time it used to for me)
If you're on OS X, click on the acrobat icon and choose Get Info from the Finder menu, and open up the plugins part. Uncheck anything you don't want to load. (Personally I have just EFS, PrintMe, Reflow, and Search loading, all the rest are off) In the application menu of Acrobat there's an "About plugins" menu item that tells you what each bit does. What I have disables a lot, but that's just fine by me, as I can turn it back on if I really want. (The only even mildly interesting one is the update checking, but since I generally find that more annoying than useful, no great loss)
Posted by Dan at July 18, 2003 03:05 PM | TrackBack (6)Great tip! Launching Acrobat went from 54 bounces to 12, and 11 % memory usage on load to 6.7%. (Powerbook G4, 867 MHz with 256 MB RAM)
Any thing that reduces an application's memory load by 39%, and reduces it's startup time by 78% is a *very* good thing.