Preview crashes on El Capitan

So far, I have installed Office 2011, iBank, and Photoshop Elements. That's it. I actually bought the computer because my macbook had gotten so slow that I figured something I had on there was messing it up, and I wanted a clean slate (that, and I had dropped the macbook and broken the screen, among other things). So I kept my installs to a minimum, and installed from fresh downloads or the app store anew rather than importing from my old macbook.

Okay, so I did a few things and the problem appears to have been resolved thus far! At least, I haven't had it occur today and it normally would have by now, so I'm posting this to see if anyone else can replicate my success.

I was especially interested to note that you also had Microsoft Office 2011. How many others here have that installed?

Unfortunately, since I wasn't really expecting to succeed, I didn't isolate these steps and cannot say for certain if any of them was the one to address the problem.

Uninstall Creative Cloud

I had a long expired Adobe Illustrator trial, so I removed Creative Cloud (good riddance) and Illustrator. I have no idea is this is relevant, I'm just reporting what I did.

I actually suspect this one is not relevant, but who knows, I did it so I'm writing it.

Remove Microsoft Office 2011 (then install Office 2016)

Due to the Microsoft fonts and the somewhat broad spread across OS X an Office 2011 installation has, I now suspect the cause of the problem has to do with the interaction of something to do with Microsoft Office 2011 and El Capitan.

Instructions to DEEPLY REMOVE Microsoft Office 2011 are here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2398768

For the convenience of those comfortable with the terminal, I saved a log of myself following this process via the command line (quicker than doing it in Finder). WARNING: Contains sudo rm -rf commands, WHICH ARE BASICALLY ALWAYS DANGEROUS, use at your own risk, if you aren't sure what you're doing DO NOT JUST BLINDLY COPY AND PASTE THIS, please follow the Finder-based instructions in the link above instead.

sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper.plist 
sudo rm /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper 
rm ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.microsoft.*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/M**
sudo rm -rf /Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Scripts/
sudo rm /private/var/db/receipts/com.microsoft.office.*
sudo rm /private/var/db/receipts/com.microsoft.office.*
rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Office/*
rm -rf  ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Office/*
rm -rf /Library/Fonts/Microsoft/
sudo rm -rf /Library/Fonts/Microsoft/
rm -rf ~/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data/
sudo rm -rf /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2011/

Note that a Microsoft Fonts folder is removed as part of this process. So even though I had already tried this, I did the following once more:

Fonts

Clean up fonts as recommended in an earlier post by Diane. Open /Applications/Font\ Book.app, click a font to set focus, do Edit->Select All, then click File->Validate Fonts, delete what it suggests)

Then clear font cache

sudo atsutil databases -remove

----

After all this I rebooted, and then I installed Office 2016 instead of 2011 (since unfortunately I do need to collaborate on Office-based projects at the moment, I couldn't really leave my system completely Office-free to test, so I compromised by getting the new and presumably more El Capitan-tested version)

I will try and update after some more time passes, but I'm posting now so others can try this out.

Like I said, I did everything at once, so I can't be sure what the magical step was, but I suspect it's related to Office 2011. Help others, report back if you have 2011 and can try uninstalling it! (Also post if you're experiencing these problems and do NOT have Office 2011 or even any Adobe CC software. It's also possible that this hasn't really fixed anything at all and it's going to crash five minutes after I post this, it's also possible there's more than cause of PDF hanging that might not all be exactly the same bug, etc)

Glad it's worked for you DigitalAir. I've never used either of these products however so that's not the issue for me (hope it's sorted things for you though). Incidentally I've raised a bug with bugreport.apple.com regarding this. They did come back asking for the output of some system commands and I haven't heard back yet since the reply. Hopefully at some point they'll come back with something though... although I'm finding I'm less angry about this now and am just used to it... I still think it's a shocking state of affairs at the moment though and clearly I'm not alone in this one.

Well, so much for all that, it did it again.

Except it has been substantially better over the past couple days. I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining that. So I have no idea what's going on now. I'm kind of curious what this bug looks like from the inside.

strottos, out of curiosity, do you find if you do a sudo atsutil databases -remove and then reboot that PDFs can be used stably for noticeably longer than they usually can?

I had a similar experience to what you had. i.e. after:
sudo atsutil databases -remove

things worked a lot better for a period of time. But then things went back to normal.

I worked as usual (frequently with pdf files) for almost a whole day without problems, which is much better than how things are normally.
But the crash did come back. So i guess these crashes has something to do with the font cache/database somehow.

Yep. And I think someone else said something similar early in this thread. Blah. I think the stability happened not to last very long the first time I tried it (upon first reading Diane's earliest post when I first found this thread), and then when it did hold up for a while this time I got all excited and got too certain that I had accomplished something by uninstalling Microsoft Office 2011.

Maybe I should remove my long excited post above...

Well, maybe this is kind of a temporary bandage solution for those of us who use PDFs very heavily, just delete the font cache and reboot on a daily basis.

So it seems like Office 2011 and El Capitan compatibility is the culprit. Has anyone tried doing a fresh install for El Capitan and then installing Office 2016? Is there anyway to do that and get everything that is on my computer now back on the new install without individually dragging files on to an external drive and then reinstalling all of my apps? If I do a time machine backup the bug will probably come back right?

Thanks to all the advanced users who have tried to solve the problem so far, it's nice to know i'm not the only one suffering through this.

I don't have Office installed (I never use that) and I still have daily crashes.
The crashes discussed in this post (preview crashes when opening pdf or other files) hence can't have anything to do with Office directly.

As DagLHC pointed out, not necessarily. Unfortunately I can't seem to edit the overly bolded post where I jumped to that conclusion too excitedly.

My PDF hangs have not gone away, I just had a ~2 day reprieve.

It may be that something in Office 2011's wide-reaching install is one possible cause but not the only possible cause of whatever is broken, it seems a number of people in this thread do have it installed (though it's not exactly rare software to have). It's possible it affects something that Microsoft's deep removal instructions don't revert, while not being the only thing that has the ability to affect whatever that something is. The whole thing does seem related to fonts in some way.

Yeah, I don't have (and have never had) Microsoft office installed . . . so, that's not the problem for me at least

I don't have Office 2011 installed and I get crashes and it's not just on PDF, it happens with PNG files. I still suspect it's related to my El Capitan mail crashes, too.

Same here: no Microsoft Office, still multiple crashes per day of software that renders pdf (Preview, TeXShop); I tried Skim instead of Preview and still have the crashes. The problem seems to be with pdf rendering in OS X El Capitan rather than with individual programs.

Apparently Apple needs to release an update to correct this. We are spending too much time trying to fine the problem. Preview is the problem!

Right.. as you can see in the below articles about the updates in El Capitan:

"Apple says that ... opening and moving around in PDFs in Preview is faster. I booted back and forth between Yosemite and El Capitan partitions on my 5K iMac and couldn’t really notice the difference, but perhaps it’s more noticeable on slower systems."
"... PDFs will open four times faster"

so clearly something was update wrt PDFs. A likely, the crashes is linked to this. (Although, some users seem to have these sort of crashes also with jpeg:s). This morning was especially bad for me, so i executed:
sudo atsutil databases -remove

and now everything works as a charm. But I know the crashes soon will come back... 😟

http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/mac-os-x-el-capitan-updates-issue s-fixes-features-specs-3594193/

http://www.macworld.com/article/2987277/operating-systems/os-x-el-capitan-review -mac-upgrade-thats-as-solid-as-a-rock.ht…

... and the first crash just happened, 10 min after i sent that message :/

I restarted my computer 7 hours ago, and I can see that I have opened 9 pdfs since then.

The crash happened when I opened "PDF number 9", while having 3 other opened. All in Preview.