Comment 4 for bug 289338

In Kubuntu 9.10:

Something similar applies to PDF documents. If you have a directory containing several large PDF documents, and you have preview enabled, konqueror (or dolphin) effectively freezes. Even if you turn preview off, there seems to be no way of disabling a preview component for the right-click properties dialog for PDF files. The same applies with tootips - you get a pdf preview, and that can take a long time. So you have to run without preview and without tooltips, and even then you must take care not to attempt to read the properties of any large PDF.

This is an absurd state of affairs. Except for large single image PDF files, the preview image should be the first page, which is unlikely to be very large. It should be possible to get the first page without reading the whole document, which is what seems to be happening.

For certain kinds of usage, where you habitually deal with large PDF documents from other sources, this kind of thing is a road block for karmic + KDE4.