[OS X TeX] texshop and preview

[Michael Sharpe]

On May 22, 2010, at 6:52 PM, Ross Moore wrote:

> Hi Victor,
> 
> On 22/05/2010, at 10:48 AM, Victor Ivrii wrote:
> 
>> The following example was posted in MacOSX TeX mailing list
>> 
>> \documentclass{article}
>> \usepackage{tikz}
>> \usepackage[papersize={51pt,51pt},margin=.5pt,centering]{geometry}
>> \begin{document}
>> \parindent 0pt
>> \begin{tikzpicture}
>> \draw[line width=.5pt] (0,0) circle (24.75pt);
>>  \draw (0,0) node{24.75pt};
>> \end{tikzpicture}
>> \end{document}
>> 
>> It results in pdf file which looks perfect in AR, evince, kpdf, Apple
>> "Get Info" but not in Apple Preview and other applications using the
>> same engine: it looks like pdf was slightly cropped from the top and a
>> tiny margin was added on the bottom.
> 
> When I run this and look at the result there is a problem
> at the right-hand edge too.
> 
> My first though was that it could be related to the different
> interpretations of how long is a point.
> Is it 72 points per inch, or ~72.27 points per inch ?
> 
> If you uncompress the PDF and look at its internal coding,
> you'll see:
> 
>>>> 0.0 0.0 m
>>>> 24.65785 0.0 m
>>>> 24.65785 13.68492 13.68492 24.65785 0.0 24.65785 c
> 
> 
> so the circle is drawn with radius: 24.65785
> which is very close to  25.75 x 72/72.27 .
> 
> 
>> Further, running pdfcrop
>> generates pdf which looks perfect in Apple Preview and Co as well
> 
> When I view it in Apple's Preview it actually looks fine; Skim also.
> Where it does not look fine is in TeXshop's Preview.
> So there is definitely a problem in some viewers based on Apple's
> PDFKit, but maybe Apple doesn't actually use it themselves?
> 
> BTW, my versions are quite old:
>  Preview v3.0.9
>  Skim 1.2.7 (45)
>  TeXshop 2.31  under  MacOS X 10.4.11 .
> 
>> 
>> Would be it possible to explain the reason of such unusual behavior?
> 
> 
> Maybe an error has been introduced with either OSX 10.5 or 10.6 ?
> 

Something quite interesting is going on here. I'm using 10.6.3 and when processing the file with pdflatex, the top of the circle is cut off. However, if I process instead with
latex xxx
dvips -oxxx.ps xxx.dvi
ps2eps -g -r=360 xxx.ps
epstopdf xxx.eps

then I get a file with no inappropriate cropping in Preview or in the TeXShop previewer. What I see now in Acrobat is identical to what I see in Preview. (This was not the case last year---PDFKit based viewers always clipped off part of the top back then. I sent in a bug report more than a year ago about this.) Could it be that pdfcrop had adjusted for Apple's former bad behavior in PDFKit, and Apple has now repaired one of their pdf rendering bugs?

Michael