[OS X TeX] Viewing PDFs under Sierra

[Richard Seguin]

> On Mar 20, 2017, at 10:54 AM, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Mar 20, 2017, at 10:33 AM, Alexander,J <jalex at lse.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> I recently attended a conference where a number of Macs running Sierra were used to display beamer presentations.  I was struck by two things: (1) when PDFs were viewed using “full screen mode”, unsightly scroll bars were still shown, and (2) despite it being labelled “full screen mode”, the PDF did not seem to fill the full screen.
>> 
>> Has anyone else experienced similar issues with viewing full screen PDFs under Sierra?  (I suppose there’s a chance these computers were just incorrectly configured.) I ask because I’m thinking about upgrading to Sierra, but if it doesn’t play well with LaTeX, that’s a reason against doing so.
>> 
>> Many thanks,
>> 
>> Jason
>> 
>> --
>> Prof. J. McKenzie Alexander
>> Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
>> London School of Economics and Political Science
>> Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
>> 
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> 
> Howdy,
> 
> I assume you're using Preview to view the beamer slide pdf. As far as the scroll bar is concerned please check the state of the `Show scroll bars' item on the `General' tab of `System Preferences'. It should be set to `Automatically based on mouse or trackpad' and the scroll bar will not be there. It also automatically goes to view a single frame too. There is a black border around the frame but that may be because of the aspect ratio of the frame.
> 
> How are you going to Full Screen mode in Preview? You should do it via the View->Enter Full Screen (Ctl-Cmd-F) menu item rather than dragging the window to fit.
> 
> PS: I tend to Always show the scroll bar. The problem with hiding the scroll bar in most circumstances is that you don't really know if there is any more to view without it. I remember an iPad app had settings that were longer than a single page and it took a while before I was able to find the one I wanted because the page happened to fit perfectly and there was no indication that there was more to view.
> 
> PPS: The PDFKit framework is MUCH better under Sierra than under El Capitan. The text is much sharper with a non-Retina display.
> 
> Good Luck,
> 
> Herb Schulz
> (herbs at wideopenwest dot com)


Based on the prospect of better PDF viewing, I finally decided to upgrade my 2014 Mini from 10.11.6 to Sierra 10.12.4, thinking also that the .4 version must now be pretty stable. The install was nearly finished when I got a black screen. I spent a lot of time on the phone with Apple, and then another reinstall (hence another big download) of Sierra did the same thing. When powered off and powered back on, it would appear to be booting normally with the white apple logo and the progress bar, but then the screen would go black again. Disk repair and resetting PRAM did nothing and the hardware test was OK. This was all pretty painful too since I have a modest speed DSL connection. Apple suggested that I try doing a clean install of Sierra (yet another, third, download) and then move everything over from my Time Machine Backup. All that would have finished after bedtime. In desperation, I decided to just reinstall 10.11.6 from my time machine backup, and discovered that in the process we had also somehow wiped out the recovery volume, so I had to do the internet version of recovery, and it took a long time just for that to download. Finally, I got everything restored, it’s working fine, and I was back to serenity last night well before bed time. Now I have to rethink if I want to try this again. Quote from Apple: “Unfortunately, things like this do happen every once in a while."

Richard Séguin