PDF reader flickers / shakes / trembles MacOs

Quinsonius
edited today at 6:42pm
Hi everyone, some serious PDF reader issue here

I have Zotero installed on two devices, an iMac and a Macbook Air. On both, OS and Zotero up to date.

On my Macbook Air, which I haven't been using for a few days to read PDFs, I noticed today that PDF readers is now "flickering" or to describe it in other words the text is "shaking" or "trembling". It is then impossible to scroll, let alone annotate. This behaviours kicks in with one tab alone.

steps taken:
- I've restarted the laptop
- refreshed the translators
- compared (and update some) settings across my 2 devices
- deactivated the Zotero firefox plugin
- deactivated one by one my 3 plugins (Zotmoov, Better BibTex, Attachment scanner)

Bizarrely my issue seems to really match the issue described here https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/133718/bug-after-updating-to-zotero-10-0-2-64-bit-on-windows

Any help greatly appreciated -I do need to be able to read on the move with my laptop, thank you so much.

  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Can you provide a Report ID?

    Is this happening for any PDF or only some?
  • Quinsonius
    edited today at 6:47pm
    thank you

    The issue reoccurs with all PDFs I've tried apparently

    Report ID is 1310350711
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited today at 6:47pm
    Can you reproduce it in Troubleshooting Mode (Help → "Restart in Troubleshooting Mode…”)?
  • Quinsonius
    @dstillman Thank you, I have just tried: the issue still occurs in Troubleshooting Mode
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Can you make a screen recording of what you're seeing (with the built-in macOS Screenshot tool) and either post a link here or send it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread?
  • Quinsonius
    WeTransfer link on its way. I've recorded the opening of a rather light and native PDF: the opening of a scanned PDF just makes Zotero hangs so I'm not sure much could be recorded. thank you.
  • Quinsonius
    edited 4 hours ago
    I noticed something very odd and I may have partially fixed it. When I opened a PDF with the navigation paned closed, the issue was not occuring. I remember that I had, lately, created a couple of subcollections so I went in too delete these (and recreate them immediately). Now when I open the exact same PDF that you see in the video I sent you... there is no flickering.

    The issue that remains is that scanned PDFs take an awful lot of time to open; when trying to scroll or navigate, apple's colourful "wheel of death" appears and the PDF reader may even go blank for a second or two.

    Edit: so the issue with PDFs actually made Zotero crash. It restarted immediately and this got better; there's only a short loading time when moving from one page to the next on those scanned PDFs. I think I really may have just fixed a something that somehow got corrupted in my navigation?
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