I have a couple of PDF books from Archive.org/Open Library. (The ePubs provided are often not so great.)
They use some sort of layering/transparency for compression reasons, which I presume is the cause of various issues reading it on my e-Ink Kobo. Mostly it's just slowness in turning pages, which I can deal with. But then sometimes pages render badly (just the background layer, no visible text) or not at all. (Could it be running out of video memory? Does an e-Ink device even have video memory?)
I've been mucking around with trying to 'fix' the PDF file itself, but is there anything that can be done in Kobo to help?