Preview app broken

For the life me I'm trying to fix this problem I'm having with Preview, across multiple users on the same iMac, 10.8.5.
Everytime I try to use the screen grab functionality, Preview just unexpectedly quits and I cannot open it again, until I go to the user library and delete the file related to preview in the 'containers' folder. I can also not open any pdf's.
Things already tried:
- repair persmissions
- delete various preview pref files from library (user)
- open from dock holding ****
I hope someone can get me out of this mess….
Thanks,
Pepo

peposo wrote:
Everytime I try to use the screen grab functionality,
Which might that be? You don't need Preview to get screen shots. Provide details and maybe someone can help.
iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.3), SL & ML, G4 450 MP w/Leopard, 9.2.2

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Preview app not working in Leopard

Hi pals,
I have just upgraded my Macbook (Tiger) to Leopard and updated with all necessary patches (10.5.2), but i am not able to launch preview which resulted in not able to launch all pictures and pdfs. When i double click on Preview (through Appln > Preview.app) the icon comes out and go immediately! Is there anywhere i can download preview from apple's site??? How do i repair it?
Please help!!
Thanks pals

Unfortunately, yes it is a clue. The nib file in question is here:
"/Applications/Preview.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/MainMenu.nib"
As you can see, it is buried deep inside the application, that particular nib file is the programming stuff that tells Preview how to draw its menu. If that is broken, obviously the program can't run. And if that is broken, one wonders what else may be wrong. You really need the Leopard install disk so you can get an unbroken version of the program. Meantime, you can try other programs to look at things. For instance, almost anything will open a jpeg, including your browser. The browser will also open lots of other graphics, such as gifs and pngs. You can open PDF files with Adobe Acrobat Reader (free download from Adobe), or even QuickTime Player (believe it or not). Indeed, QT Player will also open pretty much any graphic file, including Photoshop files. I suspect you can use it to view pretty much anything that Preview will open.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Preview.app ignores "Image DPI" when scaling

In 10.4 Tiger, Preview.app did the right thing and would print images according to what would be their correct and natural size. For instance, if I scanned a document at 200dpi, and it was 934px wide, Preview.app would print it to paper so that it was 4.67in wide. This is correct behavior.
It knows that the JPG I'm printing is 200dpi because that information is in the JFIF block. You can see this by hitting Cmd-I when viewing a .JPG and looking at the JFIF information.
10.3 was broken in this manner, it would just try to print as many pixels as it could on the printer, or scale it to take up the size of the whole page.
Apparently 10.5 Leopard does the same thing as 10.3--it won't print a document the right size. When I choose Scale: 100% the print size is much bigger than 8.5x11 when it should fit in 4.67in. The other options are scale to the size of the page.
Is there something I'm missing? Is this a regression?
Thanks!

I was missing something. When I filed a bug, I got a response that asked:
+Do you have the Preview Image preference entitled “Respect image and screen DPI for scale” checked on or off and does either way make a difference to your workflow?+
The result is that when this is chosen, the scanned DPI is respected not only on the screen but also for the printed output. This is what I expected. Thanks Apple!

'Preview' app not supported on this type of Mac

When I'm trying to launch the 'Preview' app (either from Launchpad, or by clicking any image/pdf file twice), the following message appears:
You can't open the application "Preview" because it is not supported on this type of Mac.
The last time it worked fine was two weeks ago. No new applications installed, no hardware changes. Restarting the Mac does not help. Disk utility permissions check done, permissions repaired.
I can still launch the 'Preview' app by double-clicking Preview in
/Applications/Preview/Contents/MacOS/
(I have to click 'Show Package Contents' in the context menu of the 'Preview' app in Applications to see its content)
The 'Preview' app is the only application with a white-grey prohibition sign on its icon. All the other applications work fine.
Please help.

Thanks, Drew Reece. This is the 'Get info' screenshot.
I will try to reinstall the OS then.
It is even funny how fragile the OS is. I guess the simple update to 10.9 have broken the 'Preview' app...
UPDATE:
I don't see a way to backup the OS w/o a TimeMachine. I would not like to change logical structure of the hard drive.

Snow Leopard Preview app will no longer opens/saves 'sgi' images

Now that i'm running Snow Leopard I an unable to open of save images through Preview as sgi format. Is this another Snow Leopard change or is something broken? Anyone else had this problem?

I have the same problem and discovered the 64bit version of preview is problematic with my .sgi files.
I did commmand-I on the preview app file and choosed (Open in 32bit mode).... it resolved the issue.
But still i don't get thumbnails in the finder or with quicklook... bugs..
Hope it helps

Can't Open iBookm Preview, App Store and other apps after upgrading to mavericks. PELASE HELP!

Well,
I Can't open several apps, as for example, iBooks, Preview, or App Store!
I can't read pdf's or open books, cant's see images or anything that uses preview app.
Can't go to App Store to look for any available update.
Please help!

First attempt a clean install...
http://mashable.com/2013/10/23/clean-install-os-x-mavericks/
If this doesn't work, which it didn't in my case, then download
Pacifist.
http://www.charlessoft.com/
You will need a copy of the Maverick installer.
Use Pacificst to " Open Apple Intallers"
The go to Contents of Mavericks->Contents of EssentialSystemSoftware->Contents of Essentials.pkg->Applications
Then Click on the programs that don't seem to be working and insall. This helped me update certain applications that weren't working such as App Store, Font Book, Mail, and any others.

Preview.App does not find text in pure text pdf works in other PDF viewers

Hi I am using reportlab an open source python based pdf generating package to generate pdf reports.
The generated pdfs are searchable using Adobe acrobat and Google -Gmails built in pdf viewer . However in Preview.App the text seems to be only recognized as individual characters . For eg the text "hello world" will not match hello or world , but typing just h into the search bar will show up matched text as "h el l o" . So although visibly the text appears as a single word , semantically the words just seem to be composed of one or two characters.
Only Preview.App seems to have a problem with the generated pdf. Adobe Acrobat ( Mac and Windows) , Google-Gmail pdf-view , Evince-Gnome-PDF viewer ( Linux) dont have any problem with finding the text in the PDF documents generated.
I have a thread in the reportlab user forum discussing the issue (see http://two.pairlist.net/pipermail/reportlab-users/2009-August/008643.html). ANd the problem definitely seems to be with Preview.App . The pdf (sample see example text in corner) is available at this url ( http://s3.amazonaws.com/code-itch/searchtext.pdf)
The app is targeted at scientist Mac users . And I want to have the pdf reports searchable and indexed by spotlight , so getting this working is very important for me.
Your help is greatly appreciated
Hari

The posts on the reportlab newsgroup suggest that
"> If the preview is actually rendering the pdf and then searching, the 0
degrees case should be searchable. If that's the way the search is happening
then it's no surprise that the search should fail if the rendered letters
are at 90deg." -Robin Becker
Test cases show that search fails completely at rotations of 90 , succeed partially at rotations of 45, succeed fully at rotations of 0.
So , is there a way to prevent Preview from only searching the final rendered PDF. The pdf I am complaining about are searched fine in the many other PDF readers I tested that probably handle search differently.
Hari

Preview app: Add text annotation with left justify?

I'm using the Preview app to insert text into some PDF files. I can use the Annotate feature to create a text box in the area I need it and adjust the font, color, size, etc. The only thing I can't seem to do is set the justification to Left Justify. It will show text as center justify - anyone know how to change this?

I can find out what the defaults are with:
defaults read com.apple.preview
There are many properties but a TextAligment property is not one of them.
I tried below but they do not work.
defaults write com.apple.preview NSTextAlignment 0
defaults write com.apple.preview PVAnnotationTextAlignment 0
NB: 0 means left alignment
Any idea?
Maybe Apple has to create an text alignment feature for the GUI or provide the property that we can set it from Terminal.

My App Store App, Preview App and a few others won't open!

Recently, my App Store App, the Preview App, Calendar App, Pages & Numbers Apps, to name a few just wont open and run. Even the Mail App, albeit opens, but wont run properly.
Ive remember seeing someone with the same problem, but im unable to findthe link again for how it was resolved.
Ultimately i could reinstall Snow Leopard again from my current copy of Mavericks (As i believe is the problem), however it would mean a complete fresh copy. If i did this, is it straight forward to copy all my info on Time machine back over onto the new system? Or more importantly, will Time Machine overwright & copy the corrupt copies that currently reside on my Mac?
Any advice or options to this problem would be greatly appreciated.
Thx

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try the action that you're having trouble with again. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Printing a zoomed view in Preview.app

How do you print a zoomed in view from Preview. In Adobe there is a choice to print current view. I cant figure out how in Preview.app.

You can select an area, crop to it and print that. If you do not want save the crop, do not save the file after you print.

Preview.app increases PDF file size.

When making changes to a PDF (in my case, creating annotations), Preview.app will increase the file size of a PDF if that PDF was run through Acrobat Pro's "Reduce File Size" process. For example, I have a PDF that I created using a Book2Net book scanner. I then used Acrobat Pro 10 to OCR the file, then ran Reduce File size which shrank the file size from almost 1.6gb down to about 62mb. If I use Preview.app to make an annotation and then save the file, Preview.app will inflate the file back up to 1.6gb.
An earlier thread (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1478588?start=0&tstart=0) also discusses a similar issue. I'm not sure if those folks were also working with PDFs that were reduced in size by Acrobat Pro or not.
Anyone else have this issue?
10.6.8 on a MacBook Pro.

That is not normal. same action with acrobat and skim do not do this. Changing file size from 170mb to 780mb (my case) should not be expected.
Preview re-formats the file (which takes a while the first "save"). It may even make scrolling and searching for text faster, but is not desirable all the time.
There is NO explanation from Apple in help or online. Keeping things simple is one thing, having unexpected and unexplained behavior is another.
Last preview update made it pretty much useless for annotations anyways.
Choosing "text" annotation used to allow for clicking anywhere on the pdf and start typing. Now, it automatically creates a text box at the center of page that has to be the dragged (and make sure not dragging other annotations with it). click T multiple times, multiple text boxes on top of each other.
I never thought I would look at Windows users with jealousy. What a bad job they are doing.

Problem displaying characters from pdf file in Preview.app

Hi,
I hope someone can help with this problem.
I have some issues with the display of pdf files on OSX. The problems are with ligatures like 'fl' which Preview.app displays incorrectly as 'oeu'. There are other symbols which Preview also displays incorrectly.
This problem is not affected by cleaning the font cache and as far as I can tell all the fonts are present and correct. I am guessing the problem has something to do with Preview finding a different version of the Times or TimesRoman font than Adobe Reader uses, and so it gets the wrong symbol, but I'm not sure.
How can I ensure that Preview uses the same fonts as Adobe Reader? and how can I get Preview to render my pdf's correctly?
Here is a sample of the problem with Preview.app (4.1):
!http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3456/33599073294296beb1a8m.jpg!
and with Adobe Reader (9.0.0)- correctly rendered:
!http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3448/335990717548aa12e576m.jpg!

My computer automatically open PDF inside the Safari
window, but I wish it would go back to opening it
externally via Adobe. (maybe we should trade
computers:-)
Anyway, we have the same question.
How do we control whether PDF launches internal to
Safari, or external in Adobe?
This is what I would like to as well. I often have a lot of pdf files I need to open and then save to my hard drive. When I click on a pdf file on a website Safari opens it and then I need to right click in the document to open it with Adobe. How can I get it to open in Adobe the first time without having to right click after it opens in Safari?
Thanks!

Saving a PDF document in Preview.app Corrupts It

If I take any PDF that is searchable (say from Apple's site) open it in Preview.app, and do a "Save as..." the resulting PDF is not searchable. I can properly cut and paste text from the original, but from the saved PDF the text is corrupted. Is this a known issue?

Preview is not really a PDF editor. You can do basic stuff such as add annotations, insert pages, but you cannot add hyperlinks.

Preview.app - Behaviour of Tiger's Preview for Leopard's Preview?

Hi there,
I am a web designer and I use Leopard's Preview to look at different pages of a website's design. This includes opening several pages as images and switching between them. And this is where I'm having alot of issues with Leopard's Preview.app and long for Tiger's good old Preview.app.
*1. Blurry images for a moment*
When I open several images (like PNGs or JPEGs) together and switch between them within Preview, the new image is always blurred for a short moment, which looks strange. In Tiger's Preview the new image was always shown instantly in 100 % quality. This is not a real problem, but it annoys me. Even more in the full screen mode. Is it possible to turn off this blurry moment?
*2. Unpredictable scroll position*
Again, when I switch between several images which are of different height, the old Preview showed the new image at the exact same scrolling position as the image before. So when I was looking at the top of image A and switched to image B, Tiger's Preview showed the top of image B.
In Leopard' Preview the scroll position of the new image is totally unpredictable. Sometimes it shows the middle, sometimes the top of the new image. Is it possible to tell Leopard's Preview that it should behave like Tiger's Preview here?
*3. Crop rectangle without outer fill color*
If you used the crop tool in Tiger's Preview the image parts around the crop rectangle were darkened. In Leopard's Preview they are not. Here again: Is it possible to have the old behaviour again?
Hope you can help me.
Cheers,
Robert

Actually, it has seemed to some that the blurriness never does completely clear up, and that the Leopard version of Preview will not display the same degree of crispness that the Tiger version does. You can run the Tiger version in Leopard with a bit of mild hacking--indeed, you can run both versions simultaneously. See this archived thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5889735
Of course, you have to have a Tiger version still around someplace....I renamed my Tiger version OldPreview, copied it to my Leopard drive and performed the hacks described in the above thread. It is still working in 10.5.5.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Memory Leak in Preview.app when switching Display Profiles

I found a weird memory leak in Max OS X Preview.app, which manifests itself when Display profiles (color calbration) is change. I wonder if anyone else can reproduce my experience.
1. Open up "System Preferences" -> "Displays", switch to the "Color" tab. You'll need at least 2 available profiles in the list. (If you only have 1, you can create another using "Calibrate..." button to launch Display Calibration Assistant.
2. Open an image file in Preview.app. The larger, the better. Zoom in full size to maximize the effect of the bug. I repro'ed easily with this image: http://www.donporter.net/NewSchool/Color/Examples/Printer%20Test%20file.jpg
3. Open up "Activity Monitor.app", and click on Preview to highlight it, so you can watch its memory usage.
4. Switch back to "Diplays" Preference Pane. Using the arrow keys, toggle up and down between two different Display profiles.
4a. At the same time, watch Preview's "Real Mem" in Activity Monitor, as well as the total "Active" memory.
5. Each time you switch profiles, Preview consumes more Active/Real memory, about 25MB per switch in my case. This continues until all physical memory is consumed, and then (I presume) starts swapping virtual memory to disk.
6. Bring Preview to foreground, and all the profile-induced memory usage is freed.
Weird, wild stuff.

Could it be possible that this is just the OS holding the memory for the app until another process requires it? Do you find that the memory increase eventually causes the app to become unstable?
It might be best to open a new bug report on this over at bugbase.adobe.com. When adding the bug, please include any source code, project or installer that will help us reproduce the issue internally. If you'd like to keep your code private, feel free to email it directly to [email protected] Once entered, please post back with the URL so that others effected can add their comments and votes.
Thanks,
Chris

Preview app broken

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