Preview in OSX El Capitan defaults to 100% scale

graphicspreviewprinting

When printing a jpeg, preview now defaults to 100% scale, which is not what I want. I am having to manually select scale to fit and fill entire paper. How can I make it always default to the latter (as it used to in previous versions of OSX)?

Best Answer

In the Preview Preferences, you can define the 100% scale. In Preview press Cmd ,, then click on the Images tab. You will get two options

1 image pixel equals 1 screen pixel
Size on screen equals size on printout

Select the second one.

Related Solutions

Keep Preview from autoresizing print output

I would use Terminal commands slightly different from @Bart's above, although those work just fine.

To disable Preview's default print scaling:

defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode -bool false

To restore Preview's default print scaling:

defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode -bool true

That way, the default stays in Preview's plist, so I don't need some external reminder about that default if I'm poking into it next year when I've forgotten I did this.

Incidentally, the first time I started up Preview after disabling its print scaling, it seemed to hang on launch, so I force-quit and then tried again and it was fine.

Hmm. Tried to edit to make the code lines show...

Is it possible to somehow default the OSX preview window size on open for PDF files

Customize Preview (easy)

Have you looked under Preview preferences? You can set Initial Document Scale to 100% or larger if you want. You might need to adjust the option below that, defining size equal to screen or print sizes.

Use a better PDF viewer

If Preview.app can't do what you want, look into Skim.app

Skim has an option to open PDFs as Default, Maximized, or Fit. One of these ought to improve.

Customize Preview (complex)

If you want all three points requested above and want them in Preview.app, I would do the following:

Turn on Universal Access so you can script applications via the GUI
Make a new app in Automator that accepts PDFs. Replace Preview with this (open with this by default, put it in your dock so you can drag-and-drop onto it, etc.)
The new app should simply take the input PDF and pass it to Preview, so it displays there
The new app should then use Universal Access commands to
1. Maximize the window
2. Set to "Single Continuous Page"
3. Select the mouse tool you want.