Adobe Acrobat has become a standard way to share information when you want people viewing your document to see the layout the way you intended it. The Acrobat Reader is free, so if you want to make sure people can see your fabulously formatted file with everything intact, it's easy to just give them a PDF.
The bad news for those on the receiving end is that version 6 of the Acrobat Reader is really slow. Opening the Reader seems to take forever, especially if you are opening a file on the Internet. You're happily surfing along, things are going well, and then, oops, you clicked a PDF link and everything bogs down while Acrobat sets its mind to opening. It's even worse if you have to dial into a remote computer or an Intranet. You find out the hard way that the opening Acrobat "splash screen" is huge and takes ages to download. If you're on a dial-up connection, you have time to go get a cup of coffee by the time Acrobat even gets to the PDF you were trying to look at.
The good news is that it's easy to speed up Acrobat, and that annoying splash screen is the key to it all. When you tell Acrobat to turn off the display screen, it also doesn't wait while it loads all the other add-in files you normally see scroll by at startup. The bottom line is that, rather than going through the whole rigmarole, Acrobat just opens the file.
To remove the splash screen, follow these steps:
1. Choose Edit|Preferences.
2. In the left-hand pane, click Startup.
3. Click to remove the check mark next to Display splash screen.
4. If you want to speed up your Web experience too, click Internet in the left pane.
5. Remove the checkmark next to Display PDF in browser.
And there you have it: streamlined PDF reading. |
