PDF preview not working on upgrade to 2.0.4

tgarrett · Post by **tgarrett** » Thu Sep 27, 2012 4:44 am

I've updated from 1.6 to 2.0, and now the pdf viewer eyes no longer bring up the acrobat window. The compiling appears to be successful given that the lower lefthand corner reads "successful preview of format: pdf2", but there is no associated pdf window that is produced.

From comments on other forums I have tinkered with the preferences by choosing a custom viewer for the default viewer, which is pdflatex:

open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Acrobat\ 9\ Pro/Adobe\ Acrobat\ Pro.app

But that doesn't change anything.

I can export pdf files fine, but not being able to view them on the fly is a bit maddening.

Perhaps the output is being stored somewhere successfully but then LyX isn't sending it correctly to Acrobat?

Thanks so much for any help.
Tim

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Post by **scottkosty** » Thu Sep 27, 2012 6:27 am

tgarrett wrote:I've updated from 1.6 to 2.0, and now the pdf viewer eyes no longer bring up the acrobat window. The compiling appears to be successful given that the lower lefthand corner reads "successful preview of format: pdf2", but there is no associated pdf window that is produced.

From comments on other forums I have tinkered with the preferences by choosing a custom viewer for the default viewer, which is pdflatex:

open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Acrobat\ 9\ Pro/Adobe\ Acrobat\ Pro.app

But that doesn't change anything.

I can export pdf files fine, but not being able to view them on the fly is a bit maddening.

Perhaps the output is being stored somewhere successfully but then LyX isn't sending it correctly to Acrobat?

Thanks so much for any help.
Tim

If you have View > View Messages open when you try to view, what information does it say?

Are the viewer eyes button active (as opposed to grayed out)?

What is your OS? e.g. which version of Windows?

tgarrett · Post by **tgarrett** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:59 am

This is what view --> messages says:

16:53:23.944: Previewing ...
16:53:23.948: (buffer-view: ⌘R)
16:53:23.986: open -a /Applications/Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro/Adobe Acrobat Pro.app "Assignment4.pdf"
16:53:23.997: Successful preview of format: pdf2
Running: open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Acrobat\ 9\ Pro/Adobe\ Acrobat\ Pro.app "Assignment4.pdf"

I'm running Lion on OS X

Thanks for the help

Tim

Post by **scottkosty** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 1:54 am

tgarrett wrote:This is what view --> messages says:

16:53:23.944: Previewing ...
16:53:23.948: (buffer-view: ⌘R)
16:53:23.986: open -a /Applications/Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro/Adobe Acrobat Pro.app "Assignment4.pdf"
16:53:23.997: Successful preview of format: pdf2
Running: open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Acrobat\ 9\ Pro/Adobe\ Acrobat\ Pro.app "Assignment4.pdf"

I'm running Lion on OS X

Thanks for the help

Tim

OK. Have you done a reconfigure? I think it's in one of the menus somewhere for Macs.

tgarrett · Post by **tgarrett** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 2:12 am

Yes, I've done the reconfigure and restart, several times in vain hopes, and just now again...

Post by **scottkosty** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 5:07 am

tgarrett wrote:Yes, I've done the reconfigure and restart, several times in vain hopes, and just now again...

The messages you posted show that the custom viewer you specified is indeed being run. My guess is that the problem must be there, but I don't know how to fix it. You could try installing a different PDF viewer. You could also try emailing lyx-users@lists.lyx.org.

Hiram · Post by **Hiram** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 2:35 am

Hi, I'm having a similar issue, having recently upgraded to LyX 2.0.5.

I'm running LyX on a Mac (Snow Leopard) and TeXLive 2012. PDFLatex used to work fine, after installing the update it doesn't preview at all. This is the case whether I was working with a new (nearly empty) document or an older, large one. On preview, it tells me it generated a PDF2 document fine, but the 'auto-open' results in the error:

The file “newfile1.pdf” could not be opened because it is empty.

This is the case no matter which PDF viewer I use, but only with the pdflatex converter. When I look in the temp folder I find a blank PDF.

What is strange to me is that all the other generators work fine - ps2pdf, DVI, etc.. preview and create PDFs with no problems, just the pdflatex conversion doesn't work. The preview for pdflatex does work immediately after I run ps2pdf or another converter, but I'm assuming that's because the pdflatex converter doesn't overwrite the PDF created by that converter, so the viewer just opens whatever it finds in the temp folder. I'm not sure if one of my converter settings has been changed? I was trying to get some other things to work, so I can't remember exactly what happened before I noticed this problem.

In "Preferences > File Handling > Converters", when I click on the converter definition "Latex (pdflatex) -> PDF (pdflatex)" the line 'Converter:' looks like this: "pdflatex $$i". Is that correct? There is no "LyX -> PDF (pdflatex)" converter - should there be one?

I can't find any information on what the proper default preferences should be for LyX. Shouldn't re-installing LyX reset those preferences? I tried deleting/renaming the system folder (user/Library/Application Support/Lyx 2.0 ) to make sure it would create a new set of preferences. Maybe this is a bug?

Post by **scottkosty** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 3:24 am

Hiram wrote: I can't find any information on what the proper default preferences should be for LyX. Shouldn't re-installing LyX reset those preferences? I tried deleting/renaming the system folder (user/Library/Application Support/Lyx 2.0 ) to make sure it would create a new set of preferences. Maybe this is a bug?

Preferences are not stored in the system folder but rather in the user directory. You can find out where your user directory is on a Mac by going to Help > About LyX.

If you find your user directory, delete it (but back it up!), or delete the file "preferences". Do this without LyX running. Then when you run LyX again it will have default preferences. If you do that and still have problems, then yes it is a bug. Can you check that?

Thanks,

Scott

Hiram · Post by **Hiram** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 6:30 am

If you find your user directory, delete it (but back it up!), or delete the file "preferences". Do this without LyX running. Then when you run LyX again it will have default preferences. If you do that and still have problems, then yes it is a bug. Can you check that?

Hi Scott,

Yes, I tried that, and still no luck with pdflatex conversion. Do you know what the conversion setting should be? Or whether there should be a "Lyx -> PDF (pdflatex)" path in the conversion settings?

Hiram

EDIT: I'm attaching the logfile as .txt for the pdflatex conversion that results in an empty PDF, taken from the temporary directory. It looks like it just ends. Again, ps2pdf conversion of the same file results in a perfectly good PDF.

Error.txt: TXT of log for incomplete PDFLatex conversion from LyX. Filename is 'newfile3', contains only one line with 'Hiram'.; (36 KiB) Downloaded 308 times

Post by **scottkosty** » Thu Nov 29, 2012 9:07 am

Hiram wrote: Yes, I tried that, and still no luck with pdflatex conversion. Do you know what the conversion setting should be? Or whether there should be a "Lyx -> PDF (pdflatex)" path in the conversion settings?

Hiram

EDIT: I'm attaching the logfile as .txt for the pdflatex conversion that results in an empty PDF, taken from the temporary directory. It looks like it just ends. Again, ps2pdf conversion of the same file results in a perfectly good PDF.

Error.txt

I'm not sure what's going on here. I don't have a Lyx -> PDF (pdflatex). I have latex (pdflatex) -> PDF (pdflatex) as pdflatex $$i
But I use Ubuntu.

Scott

LaTeX.org

LyX ⇒ PDF preview not working on upgrade to 2.0.4