I have scanned a textbook into PDF. The file is 725 pages and 1.73 GB large. It is mostly text but there are a few images per page. Now that the book is scanned in, OCR'd (SearchScan exact), and Bookmarked (all done via Adobe Acrobat Pro XI), I can read the file digitally. I am a big fan of annotating (specifically highlighting) my readings in Preview.
So I open up the file in Preview.app to begin my studies. It scrolls a little slow and lags a bit, but overall I can work with the file given (to be fair, the size is large). However, saving the file after any highlighting is a nightmare.
When I highlight a word, and then hit CMD+S, Preview "saves" the file in less than a second. However if I immediately hit CMD+S a second time (which is the only way to actually save the file, I believe, because only after the second Save does the "Edited" marker at the top of the file go away), I instantly get a spinning beach ball of death. The ball spins for several minutes (15+). After the Save is completed and the "Edited" tag disappears, I "X" out of the file with the red X, and the beach ball process occurs for a second time. It is almost as if Preview is re-saving the entire document, instead of just the one page which I annotated.
I have spent many hours trying to figure out how to fix this. I have encoded and re-encoded the PDF in many different manners. I "Optimized" the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro XI using JBIP and then with ZIP. I "Exported" the file out of Preview itself, with the Quartz filter. I reduced the quality of the PDF so that it was only 750 MB large. I repaired disk permissions. None of these various methods significantly decreased the beach ball time of the Preview saving process.
I'm sure I could break up the textbook into smaller files, but this is an inconvenience. I could also use a different app to annotate the PDF but I've always liked Preview up until now and use it consistently for all of my note-taking needs. In fact I have a 300 page textbook PDF that is 150 MB and Preview handles the file well; it only takes maybe 10 seconds to save and the file does not lag.
I can't really decrease the quality (ie size) of the PDF because the text would be hard to read.
I realize it's a large PDF, but I don't think I'm asking too much of Preview for 2015. I would really appreciate help with this matter as this saving issue is putting me behind.
My computer: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013), 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB, Yosemite 10.10.3
Edit 05/30/15: I think something is wrong with the Preview.app, not my PDF file. I have a scanned textbook PDF (530 pages, 330 MB) that I've reference periodically over the past year and it used to be a lot zippier. Nowadays the book takes about 30 seconds to save. Not a very long time, but longer than I remember...
