Howto: Create PDFs that scroll like butter

Carlos — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:41:41 +0000

I’m very into the whole idea of digitizing every paper document I receive in the hopes of achieving some sort of paperless nirvana. As such, I scan nearly everything into my computer using Adobe Acrobat Professional onto my computer and then either throw it on the server for archiving or store it on my laptop in Papers if it’s academic or frequently used. However, no matter what I do, these scans are outputted as PDFs which scroll terribly in OS X’s Quartz engine. I’m sure some of you notice that on OS X, some PDF documents scroll in choppy manner while others work perfectly. Rather than find the true root of the problem in Acrobat, I’ve resorted to using Automator to run the Acrobat output through OS X.

To do this, create an Automator workflow that starts with “Get Selected Items” so that you can simply highlight a few PDFs in Finder and execute the Automator action on it. Next, choose the “Set PDF Metadata” action and find some field to manipulate. I chose to do “Content Creator” since that doesn’t impact the document at all. Now, save the workflow as a plug-in for Finder. This action achieves the same result as opening the document in Preview and using “Save to PDF” from the Print dialog box.

Now when you want to ‘optimize’ these sluggish PDF documents, you can just select them, right-click and run your Automator action which will overwrite the existing file. It does lead to a file that is 1.5x the file size though.

I’ve included my Automator workflow script to the post for reference. Enjoy.

Automator Workflow – Optimize PDFs (place in /Users//Library/Workflow/Applications/Finder)

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Howto: Create PDFs that scroll like butter