MacOS – Preview.app does not update a pdf when it changes

macospreview

In all pre Lion versions of Mac OS X Preview.app could show an updated PDF when the PDF it was showing changed.

Example: I'm writing a latex document and recompile it. Without closing Preview it just reloaded the PDF.

In Lion it does not show this behaviour any more. It just seems to get stuck when the open PDF changes.

Do you know how to get the pre Lion behaviour? Or am I just missing something here? Is there a PDF viewer which can update the PDF when it changes?


The Problem actually was the way I build the PDF file. I have a Makefile to build my latex files which looks like this:

pdflatex -output-directory out main.tex
mv out/main.pdf .

So the file does not get updated. It get's replaced. On pre Lion Osx this worked fine. In Lion it does not. Now I just open out/main.pdf and update it with pdflatex and it works.

It also works with Preview.app

Best Answer

Try Skim. It has a preference option to check for file changes.