Disable drawer thumbnails in Preview.app
Aug 23, '07 07:30:05AM
Contributed by: moonhawk
Here's the problem: I frequently view PDF files that consist of scanned images (e.g. archived articles from the pre-electronic publishing days). When I open these with Preview.app, the application appears to freeze for a while as it processes and generates thumbnail images for each page in the drawer. This process takes an especially long time for documents with numerous pages. A preference option in the app allows changing the size of the thumbnails, but does not allow disabling them completely.
Here's the solution:
- Quit Preview.app if open.
- Open ~/Library » Preferences » com.apple.Preview.plist with a plain text editor.
- Search for thumbnail; it should find the PVGeneralThumbnailSize key.
- Replace the integer right underneath (which varies depending on what you set your preferred thumbnail size to) to 0.
- Save the change made and close.
Now open Preview.app, and you'll see that the drawer will no longer show any thumbnails.
[robg adds: The plist file is stored as a binary, so editing it in a plain text editor probably won't work. If you have the Developer Tools installed, you can just double-click it. You could also use PlistEdit Pro or Pref Setter to edit the file. If you're Terminally-inclined, you can use the process described in this hint to convert the file from binary to text for editing, and then back to binary again when you're done.]
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070821144520626