When viewing PDFs within GoodNotes 5, you might occasionally notice a lag when scrolling through your PDF content. This can be down to multiple factors and usually involves the file size of the document, however if you notice the same rendering lag in the Files app or macOS Preview, this is unfortunately not in GoodNotes' control because the app uses iOS PDF rendering engine.
Possible Side Effects
The slowly rendered PDF might cause other issues as well. For example:
- Scrolling through its pages might crash the app (due to the computing required to render those pages).
- Exporting it to a PDF produces one with duplicate page backgrounds (presumably because of the delayed rendering, or the special way the original PDF was created).
Workarounds
Reducing its file size (macOS only)
Try opening the PDF in macOS Preview and clicking File > Export..., selecting "Reduce File Size" under "Quartz Filter" and importing the result PDF to see if the slow rendering improves.
Compressing the PDF
If you don't have a Mac, compress the PDF with an online tool, and try importing the result PDF. This is especially useful if you're experiencing effect #2 above.
Resizing the source document
Better yet, if you have access to the source Keynote file, please try the following:
1. Open the file in Keynote and click the File menu > Reduce File Size... > Reduce a Copy.
2. Open the reduced Keynote file, click Document in the right sidebar and resize the page size to Letter or smaller:
3. Click File > Export To > PDF... > Next... > Export.
4. Import the result PDF to see if the rendering improves.