Preview App On macOS Ventura Drops Support For PostScript Files (macrumors.com) 143
Starting with macOS Ventura, released this week, the built-in Preview app on Mac no longer supports PostScript (.ps) and Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) files, according to a new Apple support document. MacRumors reports: Preview can still be used to open these files on macOS Monterey and earlier. Apple did not provide a reason for the change. Apple recommends using other third-party Mac apps that can view or convert PostScript files. It also remains possible to print .ps and .eps files by dragging them into a Mac's printer queue [...].
Developed by Adobe in the 1980s, the .ps and .eps file formats were once widely used for desktop publishing/printing purposes. PostScript was the basis of rendering on the NeXT operating system, and was mostly replaced by the PDF format in Mac OS X.
Developed by Adobe in the 1980s, the .ps and .eps file formats were once widely used for desktop publishing/printing purposes. PostScript was the basis of rendering on the NeXT operating system, and was mostly replaced by the PDF format in Mac OS X.
Boo! Hiss! (Score:5, Interesting)
apple likes to drop support because retaining it is slightly inconvenient for them. For some things that's a bit more stupid than for others.
PostScript is a handy-dandy programming language, if a bit obscure. But the bigger problem is that preview on macos is an "it just works" deal, and breaking that, that's just stupid. What's next, breaking support for TIFF because "nobody uses FAX anymore"? Besides that this isn't true in at least Japan, which is a sizeable market. Well, some of us have archives full of old crap in any which format and going through that and converting and repackaging just because preview found it inconvienient to support any longer... did I say it was stupid? It's stupid.
"It just works" is a strong selling point for apple, even if you have to walk their path to do it. It doesn't do to make that path ever smaller and more winding.
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It seems weird because these days ghostscript is freely distributable, so if Apple is having trouble maintaining their own postscript functionality (which seems particularly pathetic given that NeXTStep was based so heavily on it) they could still use theirs. But I guess then they would have to support it, and this way it's your problem. Apple, it just works... for making profits for Apple.
Re: Boo! Hiss! (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple. It just works.
For sufficiently narrow definitions of "it".
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Apple. It just works.
For sufficiently narrow definitions of "it".
Well... yes. Why DOES postscript need to work?
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But now how much will that app cost?
Likely the normal Ghostscript fee, zero.
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Ghostscript is difficult for a non-techie to use.
Ghostscript can view a Postscript file, but AFAIK can't export to different image formats and can't export sub-sections of pages to a new file. Preview can do that.
I am a techie, so I can jump through some hoops to make it all work. But if I have to do that, I might as well use Linux. The raison d'être of paying a premium for a Mac is that everything "just works."
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Ghostscript is difficult for a non-techie to use.
A macOS GUI wrapper around it will probably correct that.
I am a techie, so I can jump through some hoops to make it all work. But if I have to do that, I might as well use Linux.
macOS Ventura does that too. The virtualization framework can run GUI Linux, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. So Linux just works, on the convenience of you Mac desktop.
As for doing it at the Linux console, why? You have a perfectly good BSD console with macOS.
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Ghostscript is difficult for a non-techie to use.
Ghostscript can view a Postscript file, but AFAIK can't export to different image formats and can't export sub-sections of pages to a new file. Preview can do that.
I am a techie, so I can jump through some hoops to make it all work. But if I have to do that, I might as well use Linux. The raison d'être of paying a premium for a Mac is that everything "just works."
I cannot think of a worse reason to use Linux than to open postscript files. How is that a realistic problem for anyone? TFA is based on reading the change notes, so how many people are are actually affected by this?
"Just works" doesn't mean hey let's put floppy drivers back in.
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Users don't know what a .ps file is, let alone know how to find an app that can open one. Even those few that do have to try to find something that will adequately meet their needs from just a few screenshots and low-quality reviews, all for something that "just worked" before. Oh, and they get to pay for the privilege.
What they've done here is effectively kill postscript on the Mac for no apparent reason.
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Users don't know what a .ps file is, let alone know how to find an app that can open one.
Apologies for not being clear. macOS helps with the latter. When you click on a file of an extension that is not currently mapped to an app, macOS puts up a dialog saying "There is no application set to open the document “foo.bar". It then gives you the option to manually select an application or to search the macOS App Store for an application that supports the extension.
Oh, and they get to pay for the privilege.
Not necessarily. Various open source apps get macOS frontends.
What they've done here is effectively kill postscript on the Mac for no apparent reason.
One of the features of Ventura is a smaller footprint. It gets rid of
Re: Boo! Hiss! (Score:5, Interesting)
My bet is the reason they dropped it is that Ghostscript now uses AGPL3. Apple seems to not use anything with a license from the GPL3 family, so Iâ(TM)m betting they realised âoewe canâ(TM)t keep this software up to date, so weâ(TM)re going to have to just drop support.â
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My bet is the reason they dropped it is that Ghostscript now uses AGPL3. Apple seems to not use anything with a license from the GPL3 family, so Iâ(TM)m betting they realised âoewe canâ(TM)t keep this software up to date, so weâ(TM)re going to have to just drop support.â
This sounds like the most likely reason.
Apple hates GPL3 with the heat of a thousand suns.
Re: Boo! Hiss! (Score:5, Funny)
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A thousand Suns? SPARCs or Intel?
Don't forget to tip your bartender!
Re: Boo! Hiss! (Score:5, Interesting)
Most companies hate GPLv3. I know when GPLv3 was implemented there was a company wide meeting on how open-source usage was changing inside the company. No longer was it going to be freely used - all open-source software used was going to have to be reviewed by legal first.
Legal already audited the software used internally and externally and created an inventory from it as an allowed list. They also created a list of licenses that was "instant approval" - if you needed a piece of open-source software, and it fell under a instant approved license, they would just rubber stamp it. The list of licenses allowed for use internally was larger than what we could include in software we distributed externally
There was also an instant disapprove list - anything GPLv3 related, for example, would never be approved for external software use.
Software using "unique" licenses would often have to be reviewed for compatibility purposes.
Basically a huge CYA move to ensure that customers of our products understood their legal obligations, as well as ensuring that whatever we distributed would actually be saleable with as few obligations as possible. So GPLv3 was out purely because it would cause obligations to our customers and devalue our product for certain use cases.
For another product, we did use a GPLv3 licensed library, but it was a dual-licensed library, so the software we provided made a note of it - if the customer wanted that specific feature and couldn't abide by the GPLv3, they could obtain a commercial license for it. (This was fine because there were other licensed components in it that if the customer wanted to customize and distribute they would require a license for those pieces of software).
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I think this is just peachy, because I want commercial software to be destroyed by FOSS. Any corporation which refuses to use good software because of the license is just going to handicap themselves, and the disadvantage to which they put themselves furthers my goal.
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There indeed are many ways Apple can easily and legally ship and use GPLv3 software, but they choose not too because they are anti-free software. That is unfortunate and unnecessary, but here we are. Yes they could have made preview.app spawn ghostscript to convert the PS file to PDF, and shipped ghostscript as a separate OS component that is under the AGPLv3.
And any company can do the same, including the OPs. However, preachy or not, all companies need to follow his company's example. Too many companies
Re: Boo! Hiss! (Score:2)
Too many companies treat open source as something to simply take from and Apple is foremost among them.
What exactly would Ghostscript be owed here? Or OSS that Apple "takes from", what are those owed?
Are we ignoring commit history and expecting more than that? Please explain, because this whole "I use it", "they take from it" business doesn't make any sense.
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I'm not referring to Ghostscript or Apple here necessarily with that particular comment. I'm commenting more broadly. You obviously conflated my first statements about how Apple could have used Ghostscript legally after the license change with my second comment about corporate abuse of open source code which was referring to the OP's post on legal vetting of open source licenses within his company. All companies need to legally vet all licenses of any external source code they use regardless of open sour
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Over the years many companies have abused open source by taken code without regard for the license and then many have acted all upset when a violation of these license terms was pointed out to them. They tend to look at all open source as if it were a big public-domain commons, which is not.
Well, to be fair, in a lot of cases it has been software developers who have built products that way, picking and choosing tools and libraries that they were familiar with and were "free." Developers aren't really known for thinking of software engineering in legal or business terms; they're just trying to get the job done. By the time a problem is brought to the legal department's attention, it's too late and the company looks bad to people on the outside.
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"There's something not right about giving your art away for free" --Tim Cook
Source [theguardian.com]
Bono wasn't even suggesting that he give his music away for free, but that Apple pay for it and give it to their users for free. Tim's objection was to users would get something without paying for it. I suspect he only tolerates free apps because it requires
There are people in this world that find the whole idea of altruism abhorrent. I suspect what they don't like isn't someone getting something for free so much as the wro
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Bono wasn't even suggesting that he give his music away for free, but that Apple pay for it and give it to their users for free.
More likely his objection was that Apple would have to pay for it, but then couldn't recover those costs by selling it to users.
If it had been entirely free he's less likely to have cared. Apple do give away a lot of software that they themselves obtained for free, they just don't like doing so under the terms of GPLv3 because that requires any patents covering it also be made available. They are fine with GPLv2, BSD etc and make heavy use of code covered under those terms.
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Too many companies treat open source as something to simply take from and Apple is foremost among them.
Yeah, but with respect, they can do that. Take the BSD underpinnings of macOS, for example; the license explicitly allows Apple to just take it and walk off without so much as a "thank you." You may think that's unfortunate, but presumably the authors of the BSD license did not share that view.
Re: Boo! Hiss! (Score:2)
I think this is just peachy, because I want commercial software to be destroyed by FOSS. Any corporation which refuses to use good software because of the license is just going to handicap themselves, and the disadvantage to which they put themselves furthers my goal.
This is like wanting to destroy commercial kitchens, with free recipes. Free* with strings attached licensed recipes even.
I sincerely applaud your effort, free stuff is great, but your aim is laughable. That won't do the other thing, and even if it could, it wouldn't be a good outcome.
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"I want commercial software to be destroyed by FOSS"
Be careful what you wish for
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Legal should always review the license of any software library used in development, whether open source or not. It astounds me how many companies seem to look at open source as if it were public domain. Open source code is no different than any other code under license. If a company does not know and abide by the terms of the license, it has no license to use that code. It's that simple yet so many companies act all surprised by it and get all antagonistic towards open source and free software in partic
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This seems like it would be a show-stopper if they wanted to use any GPLv3 code in Preview:
From https://www.gnu.org/licenses/g... [gnu.org]
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Most companies hate GPLv3.
As your Post explains, Understandably so!
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On the other hand Apple could have included a plug-in architecture that would have made it easy for third parties to fill in the gap.
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On the other hand Apple could have included a plug-in architecture that would have made it easy for third parties to fill in the gap.
That is what Apple has done. The macOS architecture allows plugins, known more commonly as applications. The built-in app Preview can be replaced by a third party app on the macOS App Store so that macOS may continue to display Postscript (.ps) files. :-)
Touche!
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"Apple hates GPL3 with the heat of a thousand suns."
As they should.
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"Apple hates GPL3 with the heat of a thousand suns."
As they should.
Agreed!
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My bet is the reason they dropped it is that Ghostscript now uses AGPL3. Apple seems to not use anything with a license from the GPL3 family
That makes sense, Apple loves tivoization and abusing its own users with DRM. Their whole iDevice line is literally based around the idea.
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Do you honestly think that Apple uses Ghostscript for its native OS and application Postscript support ???
No, I think they use whatever is left of the postscript support that came with NeXTStep. We were discussing the reason Apple won't use Ghostscript, which you'd know if you could read. Take a fucking English class before you reply to me again.
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Apple has a license for Adobe's PostScript interpreter and rasterizer. The same one used in Acrobat Distiller, and countless printers. They don't need Ghostscript.
Apple f'd up in the PDF rasterizer until John Warnock called Steve Jobs up and basically said 'You're killing us, Smalls.' At which point Adobe send several PDF engineers over to Cupertino to fix their disaster. Apple-generated PDF is still a PoS in comparison to Acrobat created files, but much better than it used to be.
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Apple has a license for Adobe's PostScript interpreter and rasterizer. The same one used in Acrobat Distiller, and countless printers. They don't need Ghostscript.
Apple had a license. You can bet Apple it involved paying Adobe for every copy of macOS that they shipped, and now they don't have to.
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Apple has a license for Adobe's PostScript interpreter and rasterizer. The same one used in Acrobat Distiller, and countless printers. They don't need Ghostscript.
Hey wait. I thought the macOS printing infrastructure was still based on CUPS. Isn't that all about PostScript? Can they use the renderer in one place but not in another?
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Aren't mutually compatible GPLv3 and AGPLv3 both strong copyleft licenses? Apple Preview is proprietary software, so how could it have used Ghostscript without distributing Preview source code?
If Preview uses Ghostscript code, licensing would be a reason for Apple to drop support of ps and eps, but Apple also tends to drop support of things in advance of their decline. Since commercial printing switched away from EPS and PS to PDF over 20 years ago, I'm not sure where PS and EPS has been used popularly, o
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Depends, they could call an external ghostscript binary to convert postscript to a temporary pdf file - and then open that with preview. As you're simply executing a copy of ghostscript you've no need to include the source of whatever calls it, only of ghostscript itself.
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Depends, they could call an external ghostscript binary to convert postscript to a temporary pdf file - and then open that with preview. As you're simply executing a copy of ghostscript you've no need to include the source of whatever calls it, only of ghostscript itself.
That's actually what Apple did with PostScript anyway, IIRC, so yes, there's no reason they couldn't use GhostScript other than the AGPL being an example of abhorrent license overreach.
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the AGPL being an example of abhorrent license overreach
Overreach? "Abhorrent" even! In what way? It seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'd even go so far as to call it necessary given how easy it would be to undermine the intent of the GPL otherwise.
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the AGPL being an example of abhorrent license overreach
Overreach? "Abhorrent" even! In what way? It seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'd even go so far as to call it necessary given how easy it would be to undermine the intent of the GPL otherwise.
The theory that a piece of software's "user" is someone who hits a web page is fundamentally flawed. If I take a piece of bulletin board software and change, for example, the authentication system (this is something I've done many times) to integrate with some internal user database, there is precisely zero benefit to people who come to my website having access to the source code of those changes, yet the Affero GPL requires that.
Worse, doing so fundamentally weakens security by removing a layer of defense
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You have confused GPL v3 with AGPL v3.
AGPL v3 is used to prevent the skeezy practice of writing a web framework that uses a GPL program to do all of the heavy lifting, tweaks the input or output a bit, then presents the output of the GPL program as it's own.
In other words, a slight variation on the theme of Tivo.
GPLv3 is a move to prevent the classic Tivoization. That is, take GPL software, add a minor feature you claim a patent on and make that patent required to ever run the software. BTW, if you make a
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You have confused GPL v3 with AGPL v3.
No, I'm not.
AGPL v3 is used to prevent the skeezy practice of writing a web framework that uses a GPL program to do all of the heavy lifting, tweaks the input or output a bit, then presents the output of the GPL program as it's own.
The AGPL prevents people from taking an AGPL program and making it available as a web-based service without releasing the source code, under the premise that web browser users who are gaining the benefits of the output of the service should also be able to have access to the source code for the tool.
But by argumentum ad absurdum, why shouldn't someone who uses GIMP to edit files for someone also have to provide the source code if they have modified GIMP in any way? What is it about web services
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The theory that a piece of software's "user" is someone who hits a web page is fundamentally flawed.
The author of the software you're using disagrees, which is why they picked AGPL over some other license. They want to make sure that people using their software, and your users are absolutely using their software, that they are granted certain rights. Who are you to take those rights away? It's not your software!
there is precisely zero benefit to people who come to my website having access to the source code of those changes,
It doesn't matter if you think your changes aren't useful to anyone else. Maybe someone will want to audit those changes to make sure you're not doing something nefarious. Really, it doesn't
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The theory that a piece of software's "user" is someone who hits a web page is fundamentally flawed.
The author of the software you're using disagrees, which is why they picked AGPL over some other license.
Let me be clear. They have every right to disagree, just as I have every right to not use it, and to recommend to others that they avoid those licenses when writing their own software, which is exactly what I was doing.
They want to make sure that people using their software, and your users are absolutely using their software, that they are granted certain rights. Who are you to take those rights away? It's not your software!
This, and about half of the rest of your post, is entirely a straw man. At no point did I advocate violating the AGPL, nor am I telling people that they shouldn't have the right to license things in whatever way they want to. The previous poster asked why I thought AGPL is massive overreac
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Apple does not and has not used Ghostscript for rasterizing PostScript. So its license has little bearing on Apple using PostScript or not.
If I had to guess I'd say they dropped PostScript because the interpreter required privileged entitlements they didn't want to keep allowing. Apple's internal apps use entitlements just like App Store ones, though much more permissive. Even with more permissive entitlements there's code that needs exceptions to those. It's a major internal process to get entitlement exce
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Did Preview use Ghostscript internally? I don't think so. All PDF readers already deal with a significant subset of Postscript, because it's a part of PDF. Adding the additional support to add back in the control flow parts of Postscript and to deal with non tokenized inputs if relatively small, and if you've got your own PDF procesing engine then borrowing from Ghostscript probably isn't practical anyway.
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My bet is the reason they dropped it is that Ghostscript now uses AGPL3. Apple seems to not use anything with a license from the GPL3 family, so Iâ(TM)m betting they realised âoewe canâ(TM)t keep this software up to date, so weâ(TM)re going to have to just drop support.â
Not seeing it in this list, when did they ever use Ghostscript?
https://opensource.apple.com/r... [apple.com]
Re: Boo! Hiss! (Score:2)
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I still have a next machine in storage. The local university computer lab was full of them back in the mid 90s. I even ran AfterStep on X in early redhat days for a while. They were cool for their time.
My university had a few they were surplusing out - I didn't get one of those, but the on-campus computer store sold me a cube, mono display, printer, and a 3' stack of software, optical discs, and documentation for a paltry $300 back in 1993.
I used that sucker for the next 5 years (4 as an as an undergrad). It was light years ahead of anything at the time. Went to OS/2 NT4.0 and Windows 2000 until the OS X beta came out, then it was back to Macs and my old OS with a new shiny Mike & Ike interface. Be
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It seems weird because these days ghostscript is freely distributable, so if Apple is having trouble maintaining their own postscript functionality (which seems particularly pathetic given that NeXTStep was based so heavily on it) they could still use theirs. But I guess then they would have to support it, and this way it's your problem. Apple, it just works... for making profits for Apple.
The problem with NeXT and Postscript is Adobe wanted too much money to license it for OS X. Display PDF wasn't so encumbered at the time, so that was the reason for the switch.
Re:Boo! Hiss! (Score:5, Informative)
PostScript is a handy-dandy programming language, if a bit obscure.
Maybe to humans who write code, but it is inside essentially every PDF. (Yes, yes, I know PDF isn't exactly PS/EPS.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So, obscure? Not really. More like in such widespread use that it is universal. It's just that nearly every instance is machine-generated instead of written by human fingers.
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I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've encountered a postscript file in the wild.
Re:Boo! Hiss! (Score:5, Funny)
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You're not very old then? Or a Windows person? PDF didn't become standardized until 2008, and most third party readers initially had to do lots of reverse engineering to figure out the proprietary format. There have been government or corporate requirements that some documents be in a non-proprietary format, so Postscript was often used for that. Even when Adobe Acrobat Reader was common some organizations still did not use PDF for archival purposes.
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You're saying you don't use PDFs, ever? Most are PostScript inside. That was my point.
PostScript is also a representation of choice for line drawings to be published in scientific papers. I create PS files frequently for that purpose.
There is one program, xcircuit, that uses PS as its fundamental inner representation, and is by far the easiest to use schematic capture software I've used. It is rather limited in functionality compared to the big boys, but man, it's fast and super intuitive. Its files ar
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" It's just that nearly every instance is machine-generated instead of written by human fingers."
I remember the 80ies when Apple had the only 'affordable' (around 10.000$) PS printer available and we had to program PS forms with dBASE to be able to print nice filled out forms under DOS.
Later when Kyocera brought their Prescribe models we switched to that and later PCL with Laserjets.
Re:Boo! Hiss! (Score:5, Interesting)
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PDF essentially uses a Postscript subset that removes control flow and then tokenizes the text. In the early days when you made a PDF reader (with reverse engineering because the format proprietary until this century) you generally started with a Postscript viewer and added to that. Over the years though more and more crap has been added to PDF so that it's no longer a for read-only documents so that the Postscript part is a miniscule subset these days.
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Seriously? IMHO the Preview app is pretty crap. Kinda useful for viewing a PNG you downloaded or something, but that's really something the Finder should do by itself. PS files are a pretty niche use case; if you want that, go download a free app that can handle them.
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It's almost a certainty that the reason it was dropped was because the underlying libraries it depends on haven't been updated to work on M1/M2 OS X versions, or the more likely scenario being that no printer supports postscript anymore and continuing to "pay adobe" for it is just stupid.
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MacPorts has ps2pdf. I'd guess homebrew, too?
Haven't played with either in years. And I thought I'd left ps2pdf behind with the Linux box on my work desk when I retired. I guess I'll have to reacquaint myself...
Or I guess I could do my rendering and converting on an RPi. Hello again, vi. Remember me?
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Apple just helping the developer ecosystem (Score:2)
apple likes to drop support because retaining it is slightly inconvenient for them
No, Apple is just creating a third party opportunity to support independent developers. To help the developer ecosystem. Its all about the developers after all. :-)
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Our document imaging stores where I work still prefer TIFF, and will store in TIFF by default, converting on the fly when retrieved.
But then we still use the Wang imaging solution, because it just works. Yes, it does, and not much has improved on it.
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"What's next, breaking support for TIFF because "nobody uses FAX anymore"?"
40% of German companies till use Fax, also every government office there.
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Japan, too.
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Besides, you're reading documents wrong! I mean, who is so old fashioned that they'd like to read archived documents from the 20th century? Besides, we have open source tools that you can build on the Macs, it will only take several weeks to get a working developer setup to compile those tools.
But hey, we're Apple: we don't care, we don't have to! It doesn't just work, because it doesn't have to!
Seriously, this isn't just an old language - Postscript is used today to read documents. Postscript was somet
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Seriously? Every time I open a file on my Mac it opens in the program I told the system to use. Including PS and EPS and PDF. Preview only opens if I specifically tell the system to use Preview to open one file.
I develop forms for a Windows workplace. I need to use Acrobat to make them work, so Acrobat is my default PDF viewer.
The only place I ever see specific file types being forced to open in a specific program, despite my preferences, is on Windows.
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My work windows computer insists on reinstalling Adobe Acrobat Reader (presumely some IT supplied template). When I uninstall it, it reinstalls itself the next day. I've even removed the shortcut icon for it, and it will be re-added in a couple of days! My preference is to use my browser for PDF files most of the time. But when I set that as my preference it will be overridden on the next reboot! If Acrobat Reader is not on my system when I reboot, it make Microsoft Edge the default reader!! Windows is
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For iTunes that may be the case, but for every other application it isn't. Default apps for file type XYZ (either via extension, legacy OSType, or MIME) are easy to flip in preferences, or from the Finder on any Open event
Perhaps because a postscript file is a program (Score:2)
Re:Perhaps because a postscript file is a program (Score:2)
And Apple want all programs to be provided through their application store
It has nothing to do with the Mac App Store.
Re:Perhaps because a postscript file is a program (Score:2)
Crypto raises the holy spectre of an executable embedded running unknown on Apple’s stack.
That has much more the logic credibility than sandbox sand throwing.
What next? (Score:3)
Dropping support for .dvi files?
Best wishes,
Bob
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Meh. Good riddance, I say.
Regards,
-DF
GhostScript for the Win! (Score:2)
When I did my thesis, back in 1996, many of the papaers I needed were in PS, and since at the time I was a Windows/SlowLaris user, I relied on GhostScript to read those papaers.
My only PS documents are precicely those papers, that I read every 10 years for nostalgia's sake.
I I could use GhostScript then, I can use it now. I did it before, I can do it again. If I could, so can you ;-)
Re: GhostScript for the Win! (Score:3)
Dude. ps2pdf and move on.
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When I did my thesis, back in 1996, many of the papaers I needed were in PS, and since at the time I was a Windows/SlowLaris user, I relied on GhostScript to read those papaers.
Forgive my old/dumb but wasn't .ps the primary output format from LaTeX? (Maybe it still is.) I always thought LaTeX was pretty genius for authoring technical papers.
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If I'm recalling correctly, TeX produces .dvi files which can then be dvi2ps'd although with the inclusion of pdftex in the MacTeX package I haven't done that in years. You're right though, (La)TeX was -- and remains -- pretty genius.
(MacOS as of Monterey (12.5) still includes pstopdf. One hopes that remains in Ventura although Ghostscript is readily installed with the brew package manager.)
PErhaps security reasons? (coupled with others) (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike PDF, PostScript is a turing complete language. Perhaps just now the penny droped on apple abut the security implications of letting Preview run Programs that can easily be downloaded from the net.
Couple that with saving a few bucks on development and testing of that functionality and (as some other smarter posters have said) that parts of PS support moved to GPLv3 (which Apple particularly hates), and this was as good as any moment to drop it.
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand, anything Adobe is expensive legacy product. If there is another way, Apple is right for looking towards the future. I pay for Adobe products. It they are not what they used to be.
Re: (Score:2)
I pay for Adobe products. It they are not what they used to be.
Oh come now. I was an IT drone doing support for Adobe products for a graphic design firm way back in 1996. My company was in the beta test for Adobe Illustrator 7. I assure you, the only product that Adobe has not seriously fucked up at least once is Photoshop, because it absolutely could not afford to fuck up that cash cow. But otherwise? Yeah, nah, Adobe is definitely not known for getting it right every time.
Telematics (Score:2)
I'm guessing their telematics showed that hardly anyone was opening a postscript file, or no code was being called to render postscript. As you said, postscript is a complete programming language, so why take the risk?
As for GPL, as another poster pointed out, Apple doesn't use Ghostscript. They have their own Adobe-licensed Postscript libraries ported over from OpenSTEP.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, PostScript is Turing-complete. But standard PostScript doesn't have operators that let it access your file system or the Internet, and if your interpreter does have such operators, they should be easily be disabled.
With a proper PS interpreter, the worst that can happen is a DoS attempt as the PS file loops forever or allocates lots of memory... both of which can be stopped with sensible resource limit settings.
No comment (Score:2)
Security reasons and/or GPL3 (Score:2)
Microsoft also dropped support for PostScript four years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
You are incorrect in your sentence, though what is ACTUALLY STATED in the Wikipedia link is correct.
EPS is not the only kind of Postscript; Office is not the only product from Microsoft; and Microsoft **STILL** ships with printer drivers supporting Postscript.
Postscript was nice... (Score:2)
.. but it begat a billion documents that would have been great in HTML, but some dufus just HAD to write them in PDF.
Nobody like feature loss, but ... (Score:2)
I'm trying to recall if I *ever* even attempted to open an .eps or .ps file using Preview on a Mac in the last 20 years or so I've owned them? I don't think so!
I've definitely run across an .eps file here or there, but it was always in the context of needing to work with it in a commercial package.
Frankly, I won't miss the loss of this support in Preview, but sure would be great if Apple would improve compatibility with PDFs in it.
The last 2-3 postscript files I've encountered... (Score:2)
...were the 100 page printouts on the office printer that someone screwed up trying to print. My guess is that the reason Apple dropped support is that nobody is using it. The only people that will miss it are the Slashdotters on this thread that likely don't own an Apple product in the first place. They also dropped the serial port, the VGA port and the floppy drive.
Legacy Ports and Legacy Formats (Score:2)
Apple did their Risk Assessment, deemed EPS unworthy, and got rid of it.
Vote with your wallet if you want to send them a message. Angry tweets and web posts don't change anything.
Re: (Score:2)
I once put a fair amount of effort into writing a utility that did for PDF what psbook / psnup do for PS. Never finished unfortunately. I had the mechanics but the commandline structure is EVIL. (I did accomplish this much of the parsing [stackoverflow.com].)