Unfortunately, “pdf” is too short to search on, so apologies if this has been covered.
I’m reading more and more pdfs off the arXiv recently, and since I’ve got a wide screen I’m digging on the “facing pages” setting of the pdf renderer. Is there any way to set this as the default behavior? I’ve looked through the preferences of Preview, but I don’t see anything, and I don’t even know where to start looking to get Safari to render pdfs in facing pages by default.
In Preview (mine is 3.07, Tiger), right-click and select “facing pages.”
Of course, I now see you meant “by default,” in which case my answer is completely useless to you :(.
Yeah, I’ve been doing just what you said, and after a while it gets annoying to have to do that. Especially in Safari, where it wants to download and render the whole thing before really letting me do anything. Then it has to re-render when I select facing pages, which takes more time. If I’m reading a 500-page book… sloooooooooow.
The following seems to work:
(1) If you haven’t already, install Property List Editor from the DVDs that came with your Mac.
(2) Use Property List Editor to open the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist
(3) Click the triangle next to Root.
(4) In the resulting list, click the triangle next to Preview.
(5) Set the variable PVPDFDisplayMode to be 2.
That appears to set the display mode to facing pages with page breaks. Experimenting with the value of PVPDFDisplayMode might give you more preferable modes.
Another option is to use Adobe Reader. If you set it to show facing pages, it will remember that the next time you open up a file.
It’s a matter of taste, but I like the way Reader renders files produced by TeX better than Preview.
That’s great. Just the sort of thing I’m looking for.
Except there’s no property PVPDFDisplayMode.
For thoroughness I suppose I should mention I’m using Preview 3.0.7 and Safari 2.0.4 on Mac OS 10.4.7. Does that make a difference?
More tools, more memory, more conflicts. I’ve got a pdf reader that renders arXiv pdfs as well as my own come out of TeXShop. I don’t want to sacrifice even more space for one tool that does the one thing I’m slightly dissatisfied with in my current set. Safari and Preview can render facing pages, and I’m sure there’s some way of making that behavior the default even if the developers didn’t think it would be popular enough to put it into the preferences panel. Tyrrell McAllister’s solution would be perfect but for the aforementioned quirk.
Huh. I have the same specs. You could always try adding the property with the “New Sibling” button in Property List Editor.
Brilliant!
Strange. When I delete my Preview .plist file and force Preview to create a new one, the property PVPDFDisplayMode does not appear. I how it got into my plist file to begin with? At any rate, creating the PVPDFDisplayMode property with the New Sibling button, setting the new property’s class to Number, and then setting its value to 2 works.
So now any idea how to get the same thing to happen when I open a pdf in Safari, so I don’t have to download and open it in pdf before deciding it’s worth saving a copy?
“I wonder how” I meant. Anyway, glad it worked.
Oddly, my original .plist file has a slew of properties that don’t appear when Preview creates a new one. They must be created when you start changing settings within Preview or something.
I prefer to use PDF Browser Plugin for viewing PDFs within Safari. It renders faster in my experience. It also remembers being set to display with Facing Pages. However, it doesn’t seem to remember the viewing scale, which is pretty annoying. Maybe your screen is wide enough so that that doesn’t matter, though.
Oh, man, I played with Property List editor and the preferences file, and even went so far as to open up Interface Builder and set the default menu selections there. Good job, Tyrrell McAllister! FWIW, I don’t have PVPDFDisplayMode present, either…
There used to be a way to grok all of the preferences from the command line, even the ones that aren’t in the plist file. The Mac has a neat preferences system that handles all of that, and lots of prefs that are default aren’t in the plist – anyone remember how to do this? I’ve not played with this stuff in a while (Tidy for Mac OS X is the only Mac program I’ve ever built, and it’s getting long in the tooth).