Are multiple PDFS in my document slowing down the project?

Question

I am designing a commemorative journal for the agency I work for.  I have placed both  PDFs and jpegs in the journal and am noticing that my 58 page 8 1/2 X11 document is becomng very sluggish and the document is crawling (virtually at a standstill) when I move around in the document.  Should I replace all my PDFs with jpeg versions of the graphics?  Would that make the project more efficient?  or.....do you think I need more RAM?
THANKS!  Elisse01

Answer 1

Cross-references, when you set them up in InDesign, would look like "See the entry on Cross-References on page 45" and the page number auto-updates with changes in the document, so if that section gets pushed to page 47, the "see page XX" gets updated from 45 to 47. If you don't know what they are, you probably don't have 'em. I can verify that a document with large numbers of crossrefs will bog down your computer; it seems all I work on these days is long docs with lots of cross-references, and it makes me want to upgrade.
2 gigabytes of RAM is what I'd call "absolute minimum for any kind of computing on WIn7 in 2011." I think you'd notice improvements across the board if you upgraded to 8 gigs, and probably even if you bumped it to 4 gigs. However, that still may not be the cause of your slowdowns.
In order to improve performance in InDesign, you can:
Set Live Screen Draw to Delayed or Never in Edit -> Preferences -> Interface
Turn off Dynamic Spelling in Edit -> Spelling -> Dynamic Spelling
Turn off Live Preflight in Window -> Output -> Preflight
In InDesign, you can shift from High-Quality Display to Typical Display under View -> Display Performance. If you're on High Quality, shift to Typical - it'll draw images with 72ppi previews instead of at full resolution. However, if you're already at Typical, then this won't help you very much. I don't think that saving down to JPEG would help a lot, but it might - if you're watching your PDFs being drawn slowly then maybe that would increase the rate of screen draw. Much depends on the content of those PDFs, so if they're just pictures (no text, no vector art) then saving out TIFFs or JPEGs might improve matters for you. However, before leaving PDF to move to a lossy format like JPEG, I'd ask you if there might be updated video card drivers for your machine. Honestly, I can't say that a better video card would improve performance more than more RAM would, for you, but the possibility is there.
But, before you spend money - have you tried to do anything to your computer to generally improve performance? I didn't read it too closely, but this list of suggestions was one of the first hits I got when I searched for "windows 7 performance tweaks." If you've not tried anything of the sort, it may be worth a try.
I'm sure that some other posters will be able to come up with some more things to try, both in InDesign and on your install of Windows. However, even though I can't look over your shoulder... I have a hunch that your hunch is correct, that you're just running up against the limits of your hardware.