[Tex/LaTex] TeXShop on MacOs El Captain – blurry pdf

renderingtexshopviewers

I've recently updated to el captain OS, and the pdf viewer is coming up blurry. There are no issues if I open the pdf file in Preview directly, only the Preview pdf viewer in TexShop.

I have downloaded the latest version of MacTex.

EDIT: Below a picture with Preview on the right and TeXShop on the left.

Best Answer

First, on the right you are having Acrobat Reader (not Preview), which has its own PDF rendering package. If the left PDE was rendered using El Capitan's PDF rendering package (the same package that renders PDFs in OS X native Preview app) then it is highly likely you can do nothing about the quality because the PDF rendering package is not working very well in El Capitan. For this reason (Blurry PDFs in Preview in El Capitan) I rolled back to Yosemite.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Use TeXShop Preview window when different output-dir is set

Let me explain a little more the solution suggested in my above comments. In TeXShop, you can choose which "engine" to call when pressing the Typeset button. An "Engine“ is basically a shell script which calls standard TeX commands, and sometimes much more (see the TeXShop help panel or this post for instance). In your case, modifying the pdfTeX command in the TeXShop Preferences changes the standard LaTeX engine. As a result of your modification, TeXShop cannot open the PDF preview automatically after typesetting. One way to restore this behaviour is to write a new engine.

To do so, you can simply create a shell script containing the following code

#!/bin/bash
pdflatex --output-dir=/tmp "$1"
open -a TeXShop /tmp/$(echo $1 | sed 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1\.pdf/')

Make sure the execution bit is active (chmod +x), change the extension to .engine and move the script to the ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines folder. Launch TeXShop and select your new engine in the popup menu next to the Typeset button, then press Typeset.

There may be a more elegant solution, but this works.

[Tex/LaTex] Texshop and inverse search

I quote from the Release Notes of version 3.18

Version 3.18 has only a single change:

TeXShop contains an obsolete sync method called Search Sync, and a modern replacement by Jerome Laurens called SyncTeX. In recent versions of TeXShop, the obsolete Search Sync from the Preview Window to the Source Window randomly hangs, making TeXShop unresponsive This was supposed to be fixed in version 3.17, but it wasn't. Unfortunately, when the modern SyncTeX cannot find a match, it calls the old Search Sync, so SyncTeX can indirectly hang as well.

It is silly to waste time on an obsolete method, so in TeXShop 3.18, Search Sync from the Preview Window to the Source Window is disabled and does nothing. Most users will notice no change. Users who misconfigured SyncTeX will lose synchronization.

Users should check that

1) in TeXShop Preferences under the Typesetting tab, the "Sync Method" is set to SyncTeX;

2) in TeXShop Preferences under the Engine tab, the two configuration lines for "pdfTeX" each contain the following flags
--file-line-error --synctex=1
3) in TeXShop Preferences on the same page, the two "TeX + dvips + distiller" lines contain the following instruction
--extratexopts "-file-line-error -synctex=1"
The easy way to do this is to push the four "Default" buttons beside these four entries.

(The doc uses --syncTeX=1, but it's wrong, so I edited it in the quotation.)