Text in a PDF appears slowly

If the text in a PDF document takes a long time to appear, you can change a few options to help speed it up.

To speed up the appearance of text:

  1. Choose Skim > Preferences, and click Display.
  2. Enter a larger number in the "Greeking threshold" field.
  3. Deselect the "Anti-alias text" checkbox.

Text in a point size smaller than the greeking threshold appears as a gray blur. The blurred text fits the outline of what the text would actually look like, but is illegible. Legible text may take longer to display because Skim must render each character individually.

If you turn off the "Anti-alias text" option, small characters may appear fuzzy, and large characters may appear jagged instead of smooth.

See also

I don’t see line art in my PDF document  
The text looks jagged in my PDF document  
Small text is unreadable in my PDF document