Foiled's page

34.5MB for GMs Guide (92 pages)
15.5MB for Hero’s Handbook (76 pages)

For reference the Core Rulebook is 84.8MB (642 pages)

You will want to send an email to customer.service@paizo.com about this.

Thanks for the response! On my laptop, it’s quite quick, but still perceptibly slower than the other PDFs. Certainly not so slow as to be a problem

The problem appears on my (less powerful) iPad.

I am using the Foxit iOS app on my iPad. After exploring other PDF viewer apps, it seems that most perform better, but unfortunately I don’t find any of them nearly as useful as Foxit.

So it seems that my difficulties are due in part to the Foxit app being slow, however not only. The fact that every other PDF from Paizo that I own is fast to view, means that the Beginner Box PDFs are partially to blame :/

I purchased the Pathfinder HumbleBundle recently.

Viewing all the other PDFs in the bundle on my iPad is a great experience (I can jump to any page of e.g. the core rulebook, and the page appears in ~1s, and then switching pages forwards/backwards is immediate), but the PDFs in the Beginner Box are terribly slow to load and view. When jumping to a page in either the Hero's or GM's Handbook, it takes anywhere from around 7s to >30s to see the content, and then switching pages forwards/backwards takes about 3s to load. Even on my relatively powerful laptop, there's a noticeable delay in loading.

Is any one else experiencing this?

I would like to introduce myself and some friends to the game, but this makes it really frustrating to use my iPad. I really don't want to waste the paper to print it out!

Paizo: I don't know exactly what's the root cause of the slow PDFs but I suspect that all that needs to be done is to optimize them by running them through some sort of optimizer to e.g. flatten layers, optimize images, and remove unnecessary metadata. It would be absolutely amazing if you could update the digital versions of the Beginner Box!

note: because the files are encrypted, I can't optimize them on my own :(