Disabling brief low-res PDF rendering on page transitions in Preview.app

I like the built-in Preview.app, but when giving presentations (in particular, when using multiple PDF pages for animated page components such as with LaTeX-beamer) I am annoyed by the brief low-resolution rendering on every page transition. After about one second, I am getting the desired rendering, but on every keypress, I am first getting an immediate, blocky pre-rendering.

Edit: Here's a QuickTime screencast if the above is difficult to understand

In other programs, I find options such as "pre-render next page [in presentation mode]" or "prefer quality over speed [when rendering PDFs]", but not in the Preview.app preferences.

Is there a hidden way to configure this, or any other solution?

Solution 1:

For presenting PDF slides, I'd recommend SlidePilot. Renders each slide without the distortion on transition. Also has other nice presentation tools like a timer, preview of the next slide and notes.

Solution 2:

This seems to be a limitation in the underlying MacOS-wide pdf rendering library. I vaguely remember that this problem was introduced by Apple with some PDFkit rewrite (was it in 10.12?). Before it was working just fine. You can report this to Apple (and probably nothing will happen) here.

Exactly the same behaviour can also be observed with skim and it curiously also does not have such an option. As skim is open source you might suggest this improvement here. Maybe the developers will tell you exactly which limitation it is.

Finally, as I'm also annoyed by this and I did not want to install any Adobe products I found that Firefox can render pdfs just fine. If you open your pdf in Firefox and go to presentation mode with ⌥⌘p. This gives me the desired result. A functional presentation view with no rendering blur on page transition.