When writing figures to disk using

plt.safefig('plot.pdf')

the resulting PDF files cannot be opened in Preview or be previewed in OS X' QuickLook (more precisely: they take about half an hour [sic!] to open). Adobe Reader does open them instantly without problems, though.

I tried setting the backend to PDF manually as suggested elsewhere, but that didn't change anything. It might also be worth noting that writing PDF files takes a lot longer than PNG files. Maybe that is normal, but if not, it might be another symptom that something is wrong.

Using Python 2.7.5 (distribution from www.python.org) and matplotlib 1.3.0 on OS X 10.8.4.

Edit: for a pdf and python script to reproduce the issue, please see comment below.