How to Open a VERY Large pdf

If you have ever tried to open a very large pdf file that contains a password, and then had obscure messages from Adobe Acrobat about why it won't then open?

This happened to me recently. A colleague had sent me a scanned document as a pdf via Google drive. I went to view it, only to get a "This file is too large to preview" message. When I checked, I found that the file was quite large, at 227mb. OK, I thought, I will just download it, then open it in Acrobat.

Once downloaded, I was unable to open the file in Acrobat (which is what I usually use to view pdfs). I got a "There was an error opening this document. An updated version of Acrobat is needed in order to open this document" message. Strange, I thought. So I tried opening the file in Adobe Reader, only to find that part of the problem was that the file was in fact passworded.

I went back to my colleague, got the password, and tried opening it again, but this time using Acrobat Reader. The file would now open, but navigation was desperately slow, and the document kept crashing.

OK, I thought, let's try another programme. I opened the file using Chrome. Once open in the web browser, I entered the password, and printed to pdf again on my PC. Then I resized - downsampled - the file to 150mb and it is now opening as I would expect.

Problem solved, but man, what a work-around! Something that should have taken two minutes took an hour. This was not a case of the electronic office being more efficient.


Sam