pdf trouble

osx yosemite, Scriv. 2.6
project carried over from lion etc to yosemite.

-Tried to open a pdf,
-partial page loads, stops loading,
-scrivener slows, does not freeze,
-beachball appears and disappears as scriv tries repeatedly to load pdf.

-Tried to open in external editor,
-pdf opens but is unusably slow, meaning, mouse input is delayed by 3-5 seconds

Any help appreciated. I’m not a console user, but I can follow instructions.

From what I’ve read elsewhere, this may be a Yosemite issue.

Yup, some DevonThink users seem to be having pdf problems post-Yosemite too.

Surely somebody who knows about these things is pursuing this with firm resolve. In the mean time, I suppose I’ll just do this the old fashioned way.

Yes, there are known issues with PDFs in Yosemite, and yes, it appears to be an OS X issue.

If you’re willing to help us try to track this down, here are two things you could do:

  • First, go to the General preference tab and enable Show internal error alerts at the bottom of this pane. This will enable extra reporting. If an internal error happens, you’ll be presented with a report. Send that to us if you get one.

  • Next, open Console and copy and paste any lines that Scrivener generates (you can search for “scrivener” to weed out the clutter), when first viewing a PDF and then trying to view something else and getting stuck. If there are any warning messages being reported, that is where they will appear.

Thanks!

Katherine

Ok, I received nothing from scrivener, though I’m not sure how or when it would present the error mssg. As I clicked around in the project pane, my computer display got garbled and I had to restart the computer. At any rate, here are the lines from the console. 3 of them gave the option to show a full report. Do you want those as well? RM

10/29/14 11:21:08.223 AM Scrivener[639]: NSSoftLinking - The ShareKit framework’s library couldn’t be loaded from /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ShareKit.framework/Versions/A/ShareKit.
10/29/14 11:22:02.000 AM kernel[0]: process Scrivener[639] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 181; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 45447
10/29/14 11:44:47.874 AM Scrivener[394]: NSSoftLinking - The ShareKit framework’s library couldn’t be loaded from /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ShareKit.framework/Versions/A/ShareKit.
10/29/14 11:45:55.891 AM WindowServer[122]: disable_update_timeout: UI updates were forcibly disabled by application “Scrivener” for over 1.00 seconds. Server has re-enabled them.
10/29/14 11:45:59.662 AM WindowServer[122]: common_reenable_update: UI updates were finally reenabled by application “Scrivener” after 4.77 seconds (server forcibly re-enabled them after 1.00 seconds)
10/29/14 11:46:07.650 AM WindowServer[122]: disable_update_timeout: UI updates were forcibly disabled by application “Scrivener” for over 1.00 seconds. Server has re-enabled them.
10/29/14 11:46:11.173 AM WindowServer[122]: common_reenable_update: UI updates were finally reenabled by application “Scrivener” after 4.52 seconds (server forcibly re-enabled them after 1.00 seconds)
10/29/14 11:46:38.000 AM kernel[0]: process Scrivener[394] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 371; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 45345
10/29/14 11:46:39.116 AM spindump[325]: Saved wakeups_resource.diag report for Scrivener version 2.6 (2.60.5) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Scrivener_2014-10-29-114639_iMacKnight-4.wakeups_resource.diag

I suppose I should mention that my computer is an iMac 2008. I don’t know how the hardware might be effecting the functionality. RM

These console messages look to be fairly typical (the bit about the spindump report aside, but that’s a result of a hang, as are I think all of the timeout messages). The rest are to be expected in 10.10. ShareKit will produce that message in any 32-bit application, because Apple stripped out the 32-bit version of that subsystem (it’s what integrates Twitter and all that stuff).

Ok. Well, let it be that apple is the party who changed the their stuff and caused the problem, is scrivener working with them to resolve the problem—I would assume apple’s perspective is that it’s scrivener’s responsibility to bring their program back to compatibility. I suppose what I’m asking now is, do I need to find a permanent replacement for Scrivener, or should I make do while it’s being patched up?

Would a new machine resolve it?

I think we’re talking about two different things here. There is nothing we can do to “bring [our] program back to compatibility” as you put it. The console messages above are the result of ShareKit not having a 32-bit component in 10.10, and Scrivener not being a 64-bit program. You will see this console message in any software that is 32-bit that makes use of the Twitter stuff. It is benign—just a routine warning—or I guess another way to put it: not everything in the Console means something is broken.

Now with the PDF thing, we are working with Apple as best we can by providing them with cases and bugs that trigger PDF problems. That’s about the extent of what we can do for most of this.

Nobody can answer that but you. Personally I don’t use the PDF reader in Scrivener enough for the bugs to even impact me in the slightest. In those cases where I need to view a PDF, I select it and hit Ctrl-Cmd-O to open it in Adobe Reader—that is how I’ve always worked with PDF in Scrivener, as I prefer the markup, searching and other power tools in dedicated PDF readers.

We don’t know why the PDF is running slow on your system, but the stuff you are describing isn’t what I would expect if the problem was purely that your computer is getting “old”. That wouldn’t have happened overnight with an OS upgrade. The problems you describe are also not typical, we have not been flooded with reports over PDFs being this slow, just the usual multi-OS-version trickle.

So you should consider doing a little maintenance and Mac troubleshooting—that should be the first thing on your list after a major OS upgrade anyway, but especially if there are problems. Upgrading from 10.7 to 10.10 is a pretty big jump, so it also might be a clean install on a formatted drive is the best course of action—that all of this is not a systematic bug that anyone else will be able to reproduce, but rather a crippled condition brought about by a botched update script. I don’t know that, but it’s a possibility. I’ve had occasions where an OS X update was a huge mess until I did a reinstall.

I think you’re talking about one thing, and I don’t know what I’m talking about. The only reason I mentioned any of that “whose responsible” stuff was because of previous posts mentioning where the problem probably originated. It never seemed relevant except insofar as it might be a clue to whether or not there was anything I might do to resolve the issue.

That said, I was running mavericks before yosemite and all was right with the world. After the upgrade, I used the disk utility to verify my HDDs and repair permissions, but that’s about as far as I’ve gone with the maintenance. There are 3 users on this machine so it’s a bit tricky to start from scratch, but perhaps that’s the way to go.

I really appreciate your time and attention. It sounds as though I’ve got some research to do and some hours of IT.

All the best,
RM

Okay, upgrading from 10.9 isn’t quite a big of a jump. I would of course save anything as drastic as rebuilding the system from a clean disk as your last option.

You should isolate whether it is even a system problem first. Does the PDF misbehave in Skim/DEVONthink/EagleFile/Yojimbo or anything else that is using the OS X PDF Kit (Preview and Adobe Reader don’t count)?

Does the problem happen with any PDF, or just some? Try dropping the Scrivener user manual into your Binder. Just open it from the Help menu and then drag the icon from the title header bar on the PDF reader into your binder. I get flawless performance on that 540 page PDF, with my 2.6/10.10 running on a measly little MacBook Air 11".

I’d also use Maintenance to clean out your caches and such, then do a reboot. OS X should have done that during the upgrade, but we might as well make sure it did.