[Tex/LaTex] OS X: Blurry Beamer presentations on Sierra / High Sierra

beamermac

Since OS X 10.12 (Sierra), the built-in Preview, but also many other PDF Viewers on OS X (such as Skim) show a number of problems, among them the following rendering issue:

  • The page is first rendered in low-res with blurry text and graphics.
  • About one second (!) later, the page is rendered in high fidelity.
  • The display "wobbles", as text and graphics on the high-fidelity page is about one or two pixels up.

Example code:

\documentclass{beamer}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{Duke says}
  \begin{itemize}
  \item<+-> It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing
        \item<+-> (doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah)
        \item<+-> It don't mean a thing all you got to do is sing
        \item<+-> (doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah)
 \end{itemize}

\end{frame}

\end{document}

While one may consider this acceptable when reading documents on screen, this is a show stopper for presenting beamer presentations with animations. The low-res display and wobbling makes the audience sick, while the 1 second rendering time makes PDF-based animations impossible.

So I am looking for a PDF Viewer for OS X that does not suffer this problems, but that a suitable for presenting beamer-based slide shows. Requirements:

  1. page-wise full-screen/presenting mode with just the page and nothing else on the screen
  2. crisp and high-fidelity display
  3. quick rendering time

Unfortunately, the root of the problem is in Apple's own PDFKit library that is the base for most PDF viewers on OS X. So I am looking for PDF viewers that are not based on PDFKit, but fulfil the requirements above.

I am aware, of course, of Acrobat Reader DC. However, I do not particularly like its font rendering (Req 2) and I would also prefer something more light weight. I also have PDFExpert, which also is not PDFKit-based, however, does not support a presenting mode (Req 1).

Best Answer

The delay in rendering pdfs with preview.app can be avoided with the following apps (they are all available through homebrew):

Additional Remarks by Daniel

  • For those who prefer MacPorts: Currently MacPorts provides only the X11 versions, which do not work well for presenting full-screen mode. The homebrew variants are native. You can install them without doing any harm to your MacPorts setup.
  • The graphical PrĂ©sentation.app and the console-based pdfpc assume a dual-screen setup and provide a presenter display with the next slide, elapsed time and so on. Both internally pre-render the PDF pages. Depending on the complexity of the slides (transparencies have quite an impact), this may take a while. However, the presentation output is superb.
  • Apparently, xpdf does not do pre-rendering. While it is fast in general, switching to a new slide causes flicker.
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