Preview Signature Capture Not Working

Question

Level 1

10 points

Preview Signature Capture Not Working

Having no luck getting the signature capture to work in Preview. I go through the appropriate steps, hold up my signature to the iSight camera, get a perfectly wonderful looking capture, click Accept, go back into my document, click on the icon and it acts is if no signature has been captured. Go to manage signatures and none are there. Even better, it keeps the indicator light on my iSight camera from turning off - even when I close out of Preview. Only solution I've found for getting the indicator light to quit is to restart the computer ( i5 MacBook Air). Have tried several different PDFs and all the same result.

Any thoughts? Running lates version of Lion (10.7.1). Obviously not the end of the world, but would definitely come in handy. Thanks.

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Aug 27, 2011 6:15 PM

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Answer 1

bifjamod

Level 1

0 points

Jun 16, 2014 7:20 AM in response to sholla

Just to recap the solution for me - Mavericks 10.9.3

Quit Preview from Activity Monitor
Open Finder, select Go > (press Alt) > Library
From there, select Containers > com.apple.Preview
Delete
Restart Preview by opening a document
Go to the Signature option and re-capture my signature

It saved on the first go round, and worked. It just worked. A simple but effective solution.

Thanks to the "old hands" for helping this Mac newb get through a minor crisis on a busy Monday morning.

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Answer 2

mr.lynn

Level 1

0 points

Jul 7, 2014 5:39 PM in response to Eytan Bernet1

how do you get to library/preferences? I have a new macbook pro running mavericks and so far nothing works how I want it too things are hidden that didn't used to be...

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Answer 3

mr.lynn

Level 1

0 points

Jul 7, 2014 5:56 PM in response to Fylos

worked for me.

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Answer 4

Oct 1, 2014 10:30 AM in response to benley

This did the trick for me. Thanks!

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Answer 5

Oct 13, 2014 7:54 PM in response to Eytan Bernet1

Awesome! I couldn't EXACTLY figure out the ~/library/preview preferences part, but I did something and it worked! And it didn't take me an hour to find. Thanks to you I think it was ... oh... 8 minutes?! so THANK YOU Eytan!

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Answer 6

Oct 13, 2014 7:57 PM in response to bifjamod

Thanks for breaking that down! I didn't even notice "GO" on the toolbar! 🙂

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Answer 7

sfdeezy

Level 1

0 points

Apr 26, 2015 11:10 PM in response to sholla

CRaZY. My signature thing was working just fine. I didn't like my signature so I went to re-do it. All of a sudden it didn't work. So I did the whole erase library.preview folder thing and no luck. I ended up taking my iPhone 6 and turning the flashlight up to the paper and VOILA! Like someone else said.. if you don't see a preview of your signature in the box to the right of where you take the picture.. it will not work. Good lic everyone.

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Answer 8

Jul 20, 2015 7:30 AM in response to Eytan Bernet1

I did what others here suggested and this is what worked for me:

I held my Iphone flashlight up to the paper with my signature, which created enough light for the program to read my signature.

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Answer 9

guiiigz

Level 1

4 points

Jul 18, 2016 1:58 PM in response to sholla

[El capitan Preview 8.1]

Quitting all the app using the camera (ie Preview, FaceTime, ...) and restarting the camera in the Terminal worked for me:

sudo killall VDCAssistant

Probably the easiest/safest way to deal with this issue as you don't need to delete any file...

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