Preview not opening PDFs in El Capitan

original post

I tried 30 or so additional PDFs created from different sources, by different apps and at different time periods--all opened in Preview. Ever since I opened just one PDF in Acrobat that wouldn't open in Preview this has been true. Same is true for images. I can't make sense of this happy outcome but so far so good. Will report any further testing.

One other thing--when I first noticed the problem I changed all PDFs (using Get Info) to open in Acrobat and later changed them all back to open in Preview--maybe that was part of the success.

Did you apply the latest update per chance? That has seemed to solve the issue for me.

This issue has not reoccured since the latest update.

The issue I was having was that preview was irregularly not displaying random pdfs. Restating was temporally fixing this, but the latest update appeared to have resolved this issue for me.

Yes on update: 10..11.2, MBP late 2013. Just discovered that of the set of 10 guides downloaded for a Brother printer (all from the same site) some open in Preview and some don't and of the ones that open if edited (e.g. highlighting, lines, etc.) the changes cannot be saved:

"The document “doc-name” could not be saved as “different-doc-name”. You don’t have permission.

To view or change permissions, select the item in the Finder and choose File > Get Info. You can also duplicate the document or discard your changes to close it."

File permissions are RW for me. A similar message appears for both saving as the same file name or saving as a copy. Acrobat Reader works for all PDFs.

Will write to apple.com/feedback and hope Apple pays attention soon.

Disk Utility showed some problems ("incorrect number of file hard links" and "HD found corrupt") so did a repair after rebooting into Recovery Mode. So far so good. After testing a couple of PDFs that didn't open before because of permission errors they now didn't open because they were created by unblessed software--File->Open works where clicking on the file icon did not. Some in this batch of files (batch of 10 Brother manuals from the same source) do open when clicking on the icon. Who knows why the difference. Files can also now be saved.

So, all's well so far.

I had the exact same problem. This solved it:

Re: Why won't preview open pdf files anymore?

Same problem here. Upgrading to El Capitan seems to have been a horrible mistake. Why haven't they fixed this issue yet?

This solved it! Thank you so much!

Hi. I had the same problem in El Capitan. I fixed it by creating a new user account and moving all the important files to my new profile. Preview started to work again. I found out that "Disk Permissions" was damaged in Finder, so it messed up something in Preview. Anyway, I hope this helps.

Thanks for the link. It solved my problem with Preview also

thank you 🙂! the link in the other thread solved my problem

I ran the Preview Reset app suggested in one of the posts and everything was clean, good to go, but it didn't fix the issue. Found another thread "Make "Preview" default pdf reader" that suggested resetting Preview as the default viewer (comment from user "Limnos")- and it worked like a charm!

I had a similar issue yesterday. Preview would not open PDFs but would open photos etc. I used Onyx (free download from Titanium software). I told it to rebuild the Launch Services database and it fixed the issue. PDFs opening like a charm now.

This worked for me...Thank you!