The system pdf viewer is non consistent

lesoe · September 19, 2020, 2:47am

Hi, I have two questions here.

The first one is that I am unable to make open the pdf generated by rmarkdown. That is, although I change the default pdf viewer outside the rstudio. when I build the pdf, it is still opened by Preview.app, which is the default viewer in mac. Also, I found the open command in the terminal of RStudio is not consistent with the outside one.

That is, when I use the command using the terminal in RStudio:
open xxx.pdf

The open function opens with the preview, the default one, but the mac terminal would open with the skim, the one I prefer.

I tried to restart everything, but nothing changed.

I'm currently using the newest version of everything.

Also, I found that I was unable to give a title to the document when using the extra_dependencies and compile with bookdown. I wasn't so sure if I should open another topic or not, if so, I would be glad to open another one.

Thank you so much for your help and patience in advance!

cderv · September 21, 2020, 7:29am

I think this is currently the expected behavior for RStudio IDE. It seems it force the use of Preview for pdf on Mac. See

github.com

rstudio/rstudio/blob/8b44fefc61db4d001e6c7636f09aef01a493f40a/src/cpp/r/R/Tools.R#L454-L471


      
          .rs.addFunction( "shellViewPdf", function(path)
          {
             sysName <- Sys.info()[['sysname']]
          
             if (identical(sysName, "Windows"))
             {
               shell.exec(path)
             }
             else
             {
                # force preview on osx to workaround acrobat reader crashing bug
                if (identical(sysName, "Darwin"))
                   cmd <- paste("open", "-a", "Preview")
                else
                   cmd <- shQuote(getOption("pdfviewer"))
                system(paste(cmd, shQuote(path)), wait = FALSE)
             }
          })

You could open a FR in RStudio GH repo following there contribution guide if you want to suggest / discuss another way of handling this.

I'll also move this into RStudio IDE category

Yes you should open another topic for this question