- When I right click on a non PDF file such as a .doc or an .xls I am presented with an option 'Convert to PDF'. When I press, nothing seems to happen?. It would be a useful facility!
This relates to a sample script that demonstrates how the
My Scripts functionality can be used to easily integrate any custom script in the Shell context menu. This script in particular needs to have the OpenOffice installed.
There is also a "Convert to PDF" item that shows for image files (.gif, .png, .jpg, etc.) that is internally handled by the tools and works without any external dependency.
- My machine seems slower since installation. I am also using a collaboration extranet called Huddle which allows you to open, lock and comment on PDFs using Acrobat Reader, and this seems to be adversely affected - it seems to take much longer to load images (tried restarting after installation, which helped a bit). Is there anything I can tweak to speed things up?
The slowdown may be related to Windows Search doing the reindexation of all your PDFs. This happens when a new property handler is installed, so the new metadata properties the handler exposes are added to the Windows Search Index. Performance should improve after indexation.
There is also some slowdown in Windows Explorer, when in details view mode and showing columns handled by the PDF-ShellTools PDF Property handler shell extension, such as authors, number of pages, tags, etc. This slowdown is only noticed when the Windows Explorer is filling the columns, as it will be calling the property handler for each of the files, as extracting metadata from PDFs is not a fast process. It helps to have a fast hard drive, such as a SSD disk. Files over a network don't improve this either.
The Windows Explorer is able to tackle this limitation, that is the intrinsic slow extraction of metadata for some file files, by using the Windows Search indexed metadata to rapidly fill the columns, without the need to query the property handlers for each file type. This only work for folders that are indexed.
Other than this, I don't see other possible related slowdowns. Shell extensions are only called in specific situations, so there is no way it can be slowing no related processes. I don't know Huddle, so don't know how it may be affected. Do you know if it takes use of the Shell extensions, e.g. to access to files metadata?
