Preview crashes on El Capitan

Had the same problem described through thread.

Working on thesis, texpad/skim/preview/etc would randomly hang.

dianeoforegon seems to be onto the winning solution. i installed the beta this morning. bug is gone (no crashes in the last few hours, normally only takes 5 mins.) might not be a permanent fix, but looks promising.

if you don't want to install the beta, you could use my old work around while waiting for the update proper: compile latex using sublimetext and latex tools or similar, then quit whatever pdf viewer may pop up (skim, in my case), and open the pdf in chrome. it seems chrome does it's own thing as it never crashed. the only downside being it's browser based, and in a large thesis you can't click-link back to the same line in the document.

Yeah well, except that this solution means installing a beta version of MacOS. Meaning if something doesn't work you might cry but that's about it since you understand the risks.

I'd rather wait for the official release of the update to be honest. Yes this PDF problem is extremely annoying but I've learned to live with it. I can't take the risk of having a more critical bug. Especially since all these events made me really not trust Apple as I used to.

So you are now two persons confirming that the bug is known to Apple and there is a fix for it that will come out in the next update. Let's now hope that it'll come out quick.

I Have the same problem and I just got my new MacBook Pro retina 13" yesterday. Have yet to be able to open anything in preview. I get the spinning ball and have to force quit. Not what I was expecting with a brand new computer.

Susan

I've had this problem ever since I upgraded from 10.11 to 10.11.1, a few weeks ago. It was fine on 10.11, which was a clean install on my Macbook Air mid2012 model. All apps which use the apple/preview rendering engine freeze with the spinning ball after a variable length of time, sometimes instantly, sometimes after many hours of use (Skim, Safari, Preview, Latex pdf renderers, etc). Very very annoying to say the least. Eagerly waiting for the next update that'll hopefully fix this awful bug, as I spend a lot of time reading pdfs on my system!

Hold on everybody, there are two things to try:

1. On page 4 of this thread DigitalAir has offered his solution. Check it out.

Probably a no-go for the majority of You (including me), but I went for a dual boot option with Windows 10. I did in order to use the full capability of Excel.
Now, here are some thoughts:
+ Win 10 looks and feels quite good

+ It does a lot of the things which El Capitan offers

+ With a tweek (Trackpad++) even the trackpad works very similar to the original experience under El Capitan.

Now I must admit, after already used with Mac OS, I wouldn't completely migrate to Windows. Mac OS is still feels and works more even across different apps and does offer a slightly better experience because of the integration.
Yet my message is: Windows 10 has reworked all the short comings from the previous version and works decently. While it is still a hard sale for anybody working with Mac, it is a real alternative. I certainly hope Apple would take notice and rethink the way of improving Mac OS, as Windows isn't lagging too far behind any more.

I'm using rMBP 13, mid. 2014, 2,6Ghz, 8gb RAM

I have a few macs!iMac works flawless,but Macbook 13" mid 2012 has issue with Mail app.When you trying to read(preview) email with jpg/pdf attached - preview stops working even for other emails with no attachments.Mail quit and reopen helps or you have to open the message in a new window twice,message body show up only after second double-click on the message(open in a new window).

Looks like attachments like jpg/pdf are the reason.Tried to rebuild mailbox,delete plist,reinstall Adobe Acrobat - doesn't help ((

Any suggestions?

One possibility would be to go for another email client.
After experiencing various problems with the standard email app, I decided to solve all problems at once. I'm happily using AirMail ever since.

And by the way - there are some decent free email clients for Mac. (as Airmail is paid)

Hope that helps.

Go to Preview/Preferences/Images and select "size on screen equals size on printout". (The default setting -- "1 image pixel equals 1 screen pixel" -- can't render an image with big pixel dimensions on a small screen.)

Go to Preview/Preferences/Images and select "size on screen equals size on printout". (The default setting -- "1 image pixel equals 1 screen pixel" -- can't render an image with big pixel dimensions on a small screen.)

I would try that if I could get to the preferences pane, but as soon as I open Preview I get the spinning ball - so I can't do anything at all - EVER!

I downloaded a different PDF reader so at least I can now read my PDFs.

Susan

I don't think it helps anyway, mine was already on that setting.

Thanks for trying though 🙂

Hi Susan,

Did You try to bring Your laptop to an Apple Center? Your situation isn't normal and they should either help You or exchange Your Mac.

The rest of us do have occasional problems, but they're not as severe as yours.

Thank you for your reply! I've only had the laptop for 2 days so I think your suggestion is a good one. I may try giving them a call to see if there is anything that can be done over the phone first!

Susan

Normally I can open about 10 pdf files using preview in full screen mode and they all run fine but since upgrading to El Capitan, after a few hours, 1 or two, it freezes and the only way to get back to work is by force quitting preview. It's very frustrating as these are articles am using for my research. Maybe i'll try another pdf reader and see if that helps. I hope an update fixes the issue.

Same problem here.

My preview and other pdf readers crashes every few minutes.

I had no choice but to read pdf using chrome, which works fine. However, I cannot make annotations with chrome. So it is still very annoying.