[OS X TeX] Sierra 10.12.4

[Richard M. Koch]

Folks,

Further investigation suggests that the situation with 10.12.4 isn't as bad as I reported..

I had three bug reports. The two that concerned me most suggested that Beamer failed with 10.12.4. But it turns out that these users included pstricks in their Beamer source, and then compiled with pdflatex. Of course pstricks requires compiling with Latex --> dvips --> ps2pdf. This worked fine for them.

If you include pstricks and then compile with pdflatex in 10.12.4,  the resulting pdf file will hang Preview, TeXShop, and Skim. All three use Apple's PDFKit to render pdf files, and this is a new 10.12.4 bug in PDFKit. But now that you know the cause, you can work around it if it attacks.

The final report is entirely different and serious, but apparently isolated. A user sent several documents with many illustrations. Some of these illustrations cause PDFKit to begin producing blank pages when scrolled on 10.12.4,
and in some cases to crash. This has also been reported to Apple. but only one person has run into the problem.

Dick Koch