Apple drops PostScript support in Preview for macOS Ventura

AppleInsider

As of the new macOS Ventura, Apple's Preview app will no longer support PostScript or Encapsulated PostScript documents.

Following the public release of macOS Ventura, Apple has issued a support document about .ps and .eps file support being removed from Preview.

"The Preview app included with your Mac supports PostScript (.ps) and Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) files in macOS Monterey or earlier," says the new support document. "Starting with macOS Ventura, Preview no longer supports these files."

"Other apps that can view or convert .ps and .eps files are available from the App Store and elsewhere," it continues.

Apple does add that it is still possible to print PostScript and Encapsulated PostScript files "by dragging them into your printer queue."

1. Open System Settings


2. Choose Printers & Scanners


3. Click on your printer's name


4. Click on the Printer Queue button


5. Drag the file onto the Printer Queue window

Apple has not given a reason for dropping support for these documents in Preview.

Read on AppleInsider

jwsc

Does this indicate Adobe’s decline in relevance?  Years ago I was all in on Adobe.  But they priced themselves out of the non-commercial market and I dropped them like a hot potato.

s.metcalf

Presumably the pstopdf Terminal converter remains…?

edited October 2022

neoncat

JWSC said:

Does this indicate Adobe’s decline in relevance?  Years ago I was all in on Adobe.  But they priced themselves out of the non-commercial market and I dropped them like a hot potato.

What a weird take. But I get it, you just wanted to old-man-at-clouds about Adobe's subscription pricing. Go ahead and review every other structured drawing program on the Mac or iOS. Guess what file format they all use—some of them wrapped in their own file package, but they're all EPS at the core. It's *the* mathematical model for object drawing.

More I'd say it indicates Preview.app's decline in relevance. 

edited October 2022

macplusplus

.ps and .eps formats are no longer significant since service bureaus prefer PDF since almost two decades. Legacy graphic libraries and clip-art may be well converted with other utilities and applications. Not the end of the world. Meanwhile Preview is a handy utility for many tasks, it should be maintained.

ajmas

In many ways PDF is the new Postscript, so it is just probably moving more people to convert PS & EPS to PDF? In fact I wonder how many people still use these format everyday?

It is still a shame that Preview does not support plugins, so third-parties could add the missing support.

edited October 2022

rob53

neoncat said:

JWSC said:

Does this indicate Adobe’s decline in relevance?  Years ago I was all in on Adobe.  But they priced themselves out of the non-commercial market and I dropped them like a hot potato.

What a weird take. But I get it, you just wanted to old-man-at-clouds about Adobe's subscription pricing. Go ahead and review every other structured drawing program on the Mac or iOS. Guess what file format they all use—some of them wrapped in their own file package, but they're all EPS at the core. It's *the* mathematical model for object drawing.

More I'd say it indicates Preview.app's decline in relevance. 

I wouldn't say drawing programs on macOS use EPS at its core but every printer uses Postscript as it's print file. PDF files are simply a combination of images and Postscript codes. Does this mean that Ventura Preview doesn't support the opening of PDF files? There has to be some reason Apple isn't talking about this limitation. The support file only says what's in the AI article. I have to wonder if you simply change the extension of a Postscript file to .pdf and see if it opens. This has nothing to do with any perceived Adobe decline, they will be around forever because PDF is a standard and Adobe wrote it. The non-commercial market isn't what keeps major applications around, it's the commercial market.

timmillea

neoncat said:

More I'd say it indicates Preview.app's decline in relevance. 

Preview is my go-to app for viewing and quickly cropping and annotating any PDF. 

It is sad however to see the coming end of Postscript. WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer), the laser printer, MacWrite, MacDraw and Postscript were the original desktop publishing revolution when PCs still used DOS, Wordstar and Lotus123 (and staff had to be sent on training courses to learn how to use them). 

will_colbert

This affects viewing man pages with Preview. Before you could output a man page as Postscript and pipe it into Preview. For example: "man -t ls | open -fa Preview", which is dramatically nicer than viewing them in Terminal.

Dropping of Postscript support in Preview seems to have broken this.

----
You can just add the pstopdf command to the pipeline to convert the ps to a pdf file that is then given to Preview.

man -t ls | pstopdf -o ~/tmp.pdf | open -fa Preview ~/tmp.pdf 

and define it in your .zshrc or .bashrc:

    pman() {

        man -t ${@} | pstopdf -o ~/tmp.pdf | open -fa Preview ~/tmp.pdf

    }

edited October 2022

macplusplus

rob53 said:

neoncat said:

JWSC said:

Does this indicate Adobe’s decline in relevance?  Years ago I was all in on Adobe.  But they priced themselves out of the non-commercial market and I dropped them like a hot potato.

What a weird take. But I get it, you just wanted to old-man-at-clouds about Adobe's subscription pricing. Go ahead and review every other structured drawing program on the Mac or iOS. Guess what file format they all use—some of them wrapped in their own file package, but they're all EPS at the core. It's *the* mathematical model for object drawing.

More I'd say it indicates Preview.app's decline in relevance. 

I wouldn't say drawing programs on macOS use EPS at its core but every printer uses Postscript as its print file. PDF files are simply a combination of images and Postscript codes. Does this mean that Ventura Preview doesn't support the opening of PDF files? There has to be some reason Apple isn't talking about this limitation. The support file only says what's in the AI article. I have to wonder if you simply change the extension of a Postscript file to .pdf and see if it opens. This has nothing to do with any perceived Adobe decline, they will be around forever because PDF is a standard and Adobe wrote it. The non-commercial market isn't what keeps major applications around, it's the commercial market.

PDF is based on PostScript but a PDF file is different from .ps file. A .ps file is printer-dependent, PDF is printer-independent. Since .ps is generated by the printer driver, it includes all the setup environment specific to the printer and it will fail on another printer. Preview is PDF, it cannot be otherwise because Quartz, the very graphic core of macOS, is based on PDF. So PDF is intrinsic to macOS and it will remain so until another graphic model replaces Quartz.

macplusplus

will_colbert said:

This affects viewing man pages with Preview. Before you could output a man page as Postscript and pipe it into Preview. For example: "man -t ls | open -fa Preview", which is dramatically nicer than viewing them in Terminal.

Dropping of Postscript support in Preview seems to have broken this. Does anyone know another way to view man pages in Preview?

https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/comment/3386957/#Comment_3386957

jwsc

neoncat said:

JWSC said:

Does this indicate Adobe’s decline in relevance?  Years ago I was all in on Adobe.  But they priced themselves out of the non-commercial market and I dropped them like a hot potato.

What a weird take. But I get it, you just wanted to old-man-at-clouds about Adobe's subscription pricing. Go ahead and review every other structured drawing program on the Mac or iOS. Guess what file format they all use—some of them wrapped in their own file package, but they're all EPS at the core. It's *the* mathematical model for object drawing.

More I'd say it indicates Preview.app's decline in relevance. 

I don't think you understood where I was coming from.

I loved Adobe's products.  I was all over Illustrator when it first came out.  Learning about the power of splines and how easy it was to create smooth lines was an eye opener.  Same with Photoshop.  I read through their beautifully crafted manuals (way back when they made such things) and devoured everything.  Same with PageMaker and then InDesign.

I rarely used those those tools for commercial work - mostly for my own creative endeavors.  Then Adobe jacked up it's prices by something like 300-400%.  It was outrageous.  Later they went to a subscription model - all geared toward commercial production and cutting out the home user market. The price elasticity curve didn't include home or casual users.  Microsoft certainly markets to corporate users.  But they never forgot home users.  Adobe left us high and dry.  Fortunately, we now have much less expensive alternatives, many of which have similar interfaces that Adobe pioneered.

mschwartz

There are a lot of scientific/technical applications for PS/EPS files that remain, and many journals in those domains still want those file formats for figure submissions.

That being said, on macOS, there is the macTeX distribution (https://tug.org/mactex/), which includes the TeXShop front end that can render PS/EPS files, which uses underlying functionality.

Other Adobe applications, like the full Acrobat, render PS/EPS files, albeit, you will get a security warning, by default, when opening these files, asking if you trust the source of the file. 

Perhaps, if Apple elects to revert this change in Preview, they could take a similar approach with the pop up, as some have hypothesized that Apple's reason for this change in Preview is security related, paralleling a change in Office made by MS back in 2017/2018:

  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/support-for-eps-images-has-been-turned-off-in-office-a069d664-4bcf-415e-a1b5-cbb0c334a840 ;

If you are so inclined, you can provide feedback to Apple on this here:

  https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html 

mfryd

macplusplus said:

PDF is based on PostScript but a PDF file is different from .ps file. A .ps file is printer-dependent, PDF is printer-independent. Since .ps is generated by the printer driver, it includes all the setup environment specific to the printer and it will fail on another printer. Preview is PDF, it cannot be otherwise because Quartz, the very graphic core of macOS, is based on PDF. So PDF is intrinsic to macOS and it will remain so until another graphic model replaces Quartz.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is essentially a subset of PostScript.   Both PostScript® and PDF are printer independent.  

Device independence was one of the great innovations of PostScript.  The exact same PostScript file could be sent to a 300 dpi laser printer, or a 2540 dpi LinoType® Image Setter.  It was a godsend to be able to easily proof files on a laser printer, before sending them to an image setter to be rendered onto expensive photographic film (or direct to printing plates).  Prior to PostScript print files had to be custom generated for the brand and model of printer to be used.  Furthermore, the selection of available fonts varied from printer to printer.

Even hardware specific aspects (like duplexing) are standard across different printers.  With a properly written PostScript file, you can request duplexing, and have it print simplex on printers without that feature.  Similarly, a color PostScript will simply print in B&W on a B&W laser printer.  With PostScript you can even specify the halftone screen dot shape in a hardware independent manner.


PostScript is both a Page Description Language and a Programming Language.  The Page Description features allows the specification of how the page should look in a manner that is independent from the specifics of the printer.  

The Programming Language aspects are both a blessing and a curse.  The first PostScript printer was the Apple LaserWriter.   At the time, the Mac internally used QuickDraw for graphics.  They wrote a QuickDraw emulator in PostScript which allowed the library of existing Mac applications to print.  That was the blessing.

The curse was that programs in PostScript could take an arbitrarily long time to run.  If the printer was being asked to do a lot of computation, a printer rate at 40 pages per minute might only print 12 pages per minute.

The programming features also allowed the creation of files that altered the results depending on the printer being used (but this was rare).  For instance, a file that needed to absolutely maximize printing precision, could fine tune the placement and size of graphics to conform to the hardware pixels of the printer being used.  If you sent the file to a 300ppi printer, the adjustments could be up to 1/300 of an inch.  On a 2540 dpi image setter, the adjustments would be less than 1/2540 of an inch.

PDF is essentially PostScript, with the programming aspects removed.   it's easier and simpler to write something that understands PDF than the full PostScript language.

Of course, without the programming aspects, PostScript and Adobe wouldn't exist.   The idea for PostScript came about when Warnock and Geschke were working at Xerox.  Xerox liked the device independent aspects, but hated the programability.  If Xerox sold a 120 page per minute printer, they didn't want a language with programing that could slow it down.  Warnock and Geschke felt strongly about programability, and left to form Adobe systems.  Xerox developed InterPress, which was their proprietary version without programability.   Adobe got Apple on board, as the programability meant the LaserWrite could be taught to understand the QuickDraw primitives.   At the time, the processor in the LaserWriter was about as powerful (if not more powerful) than the processor in the Mac.

Modern Macs internally use PDF.  It's easy to convert from PDF into PostScript.   By the way, if you want an idea of the sorts of graphic primitives found in PostScript, just look at Adobe Illustrator.  The primitives in Illustrator pretty much line up with the primitives in PostScript (Bezier curves, fills, stokes, dashed lines, clipping paths,...)

verne arase

s.metcalf said:

Presumably the pstopdf Terminal converter remains…?

Yep - in fact I converted it's man page to PDF and stored it in Books.

   man -t pstopdf | pstopdf -o "Postscript to PDF man page.pdf"

macplusplus

mfryd said:

macplusplus said:

PDF is based on PostScript but a PDF file is different from .ps file. A .ps file is printer-dependent, PDF is printer-independent. Since .ps is generated by the printer driver, it includes all the setup environment specific to the printer and it will fail on another printer. Preview is PDF, it cannot be otherwise because Quartz, the very graphic core of macOS, is based on PDF. So PDF is intrinsic to macOS and it will remain so until another graphic model replaces Quartz.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is essentially a subset of PostScript.   Both PostScript® and PDF are printer independent.  

Device independence was one of the great innovations of PostScript.  The exact same PostScript file could be sent to a 300 dpi laser printer, or a 2540 dpi LinoType® Image Setter.  It was a godsend to be able to easily proof files on a laser printer, before sending them to an image setter to be rendered onto expensive photographic film (or direct to printing plates).  Prior to PostScript print files had to be custom generated for the brand and model of printer to be used.  Furthermore, the selection of available fonts varied from printer to printer.

Even hardware specific aspects (like duplexing) are standard across different printers.  With a properly written PostScript file, you can request duplexing, and have it print simplex on printers without that feature.  Similarly, a color PostScript will simply print in B&W on a B&W laser printer.  With PostScript you can even specify the halftone screen dot shape in a hardware independent manner.


PostScript is both a Page Description Language and a Programming Language.  The Page Description features allows the specification of how the page should look in a manner that is independent from the specifics of the printer.  

The Programming Language aspects are both a blessing and a curse.  The first PostScript printer was the Apple LaserWriter.   At the time, the Mac internally used QuickDraw for graphics.  They wrote a QuickDraw emulator in PostScript which allowed the library of existing Mac applications to print.  That was the blessing.

The curse was that programs in PostScript could take an arbitrarily long time to run.  If the printer was being asked to do a lot of computation, a printer rate at 40 pages per minute might only print 12 pages per minute.

The programming features also allowed the creation of files that altered the results depending on the printer being used (but this was rare).  For instance, a file that needed to absolutely maximize printing precision, could fine tune the placement and size of graphics to conform to the hardware pixels of the printer being used.  If you sent the file to a 300ppi printer, the adjustments could be up to 1/300 of an inch.  On a 2540 dpi image setter, the adjustments would be less than 1/2540 of an inch.

PDF is essentially PostScript, with the programming aspects removed.   it's easier and simpler to write something that understands PDF than the full PostScript language.

Of course, without the programming aspects, PostScript and Adobe wouldn't exist.   The idea for PostScript came about when Warnock and Geschke were working at Xerox.  Xerox liked the device independent aspects, but hated the programability.  If Xerox sold a 120 page per minute printer, they didn't want a language with programing that could slow it down.  Warnock and Geschke felt strongly about programability, and left to form Adobe systems.  Xerox developed InterPress, which was their proprietary version without programability.   Adobe got Apple on board, as the programability meant the LaserWrite could be taught to understand the QuickDraw primitives.   At the time, the processor in the LaserWriter was about as powerful (if not more powerful) than the processor in the Mac.

Modern Macs internally use PDF.  It's easy to convert from PDF into PostScript.   By the way, if you want an idea of the sorts of graphic primitives found in PostScript, just look at Adobe Illustrator.  The primitives in Illustrator pretty much line up with the primitives in PostScript (Bezier curves, fills, stokes, dashed lines, clipping paths,...)

I found myself of thirty years ago in your long post. Imagesetters have (mostly) separate RIPs that can process many file types, including all .ps files. In the most simplistic terms, a .ps file is generated by the printer driver. Create a .ps file with Apple driver and upload it directly into a HP printer via Ethernet, it will fail. This is PostScript language which is device independent, not what is written to the file. What is written to the file depends on the printer driver, i.e printer model. Printer drivers were specific to each printer because printer ROMs from each brand were different. Otherwise a universal driver would do the job. Later PPD files have been released to handle such issues.

edited October 2022

michelb76

Crazy. Loads of academics still use postscript. Has Apple remove BMP support as well?

mfryd

macplusplus said:

mfryd said:

macplusplus said:

PDF is based on PostScript but a PDF file is different from .ps file. A .ps file is printer-dependent, PDF is printer-independent. Since .ps is generated by the printer driver, it includes all the setup environment specific to the printer and it will fail on another printer. Preview is PDF, it cannot be otherwise because Quartz, the very graphic core of macOS, is based on PDF. So PDF is intrinsic to macOS and it will remain so until another graphic model replaces Quartz.

I found myself of thirty years ago in your long post. Imagesetters have (mostly) separate RIPs that can process many file types, including all .ps files. In the most simplistic terms, a .ps file is generated by the printer driver. Create a .ps file with Apple driver and upload it directly into a HP printer via Ethernet, it will fail. This is PostScript language which is device independent, not what is written to the file. What is written to the file depends on the printer driver, i.e printer model. Printer drivers were specific to each printer because printer ROMs from each brand were different. Otherwise a universal driver would do the job. Later PPD files have been released to handle such issues.

Prior to PostScript the files would need to be customized for each printer driver.

PostScript allowed the creation of files that would work on any PostScript printer.

PostScript tried to do everything.  In addition to a Page Description Language, it also had printer control features (i.e. pull the first page from Tray #1, and the remaining pages from Tray#2).  PostScript Printer Description (PPD) files would describe the specific capabilities of a printer.  The PPD printer would describe how many input trays the printer had, whether it had manual feed, duplex, color, or even a stapler.   The printer driver could then send a few lines of PostScript before sending the file to request device specific features.  


The challenge with PostScript files generated by the Mac Printer driver is that they were not stand-alone legal PostScript files.  Remember, PostScript is a programming language, and the Mac printer driver relied on a library of routines that emulated Apple's QuickDraw imaging system.  Rather than embedding that library in every file, the Mac sent it once, and it remained on the printer for subsequent prints.   

The QuickDraw emulator was device independent.  The same emulator was used for a LaserWrite and an Image Setter.  Once you sent the emulator to the printer, you could send the Mac Driver generated PostScript files.  Again, this was independent of the printer used.

xyzzy01

JWSC said:

Does this indicate Adobe’s decline in relevance?  Years ago I was all in on Adobe.  But they priced themselves out of the non-commercial market and I dropped them like a hot potato.

Very unlikely.  More likely that ps and eps have been replaced by pdf in the marketplace for the purpose of providing portable "printed documents". And who made pdf? Adobe. PS/eps might still be relevant when printing, but for the purpose served by preview PDF is better.

marklark

Maybe they are saving a bit of licensing fees for ps and eps?

mfryd

marklark said:

Maybe they are saving a bit of licensing fees for ps and eps?

There are low cost and free PostScript interpreters available.  “Ghostscript” is one example.