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Comment by orr721 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else noticed that the Preview app was tinkered with again? Now it lost the ability to open PostScript files. This feature worked from the very beginning of Mac OSX up till Monterrey. The command line PostScript tools are still present though.

Also all Ruby gems with native extensions stopped working for me, even the pre-installed system ones.

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Thank heavens someone else noticed that Preview lost its ability to open PostScript. I occasionally use Preview to render manpages as PDF so I can print them out and using the Ventura beta made me think it was just a bug. It's a shame that it is missing in the final release -- I even filed several Feedback reports with basically no response. I am not sure at all what utility there is in removing features from Preview.

My current workaround is to use my 2013 Mac Pro that's stuck on Monterey to do so, but eventually that's going to kick the can...

Removing features like this is just plain stupid. Preview was one of the most valuable apps for viewing files preinstalled on every Mac. While I can understand that raw PostScript files are rarely seen nowadays, Encapsulated-PostScript is still used, i.e. for graphs in scientific software and publications.

To add an insult to injury, the Monterey era trick still works. Change the file extension from .eps or .ps to .ai (Adobe Illustrator) and QuickLook will happily display the file. It will even offer you to "Open in Preview" which then fails.

Inconvenient, I'm sure. Stupid, I doubt. Maybe the postscript interpreter they were using just contained too many bugs to be worth maintaining any more.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1084...

Does the removal of PS also remove support for EPS? That would be very awful.

No, it’s simply inconvenient for a really small group of people. People who are probably tech savvy enough in an hour to write a script to use Ghostscript to convert every postscript or eps file in their library to pdf.

I spent nearly 25 years in print publishing tech (up until 2015) and it was rare for the last 3 years of my tenure in that industry to see any postscript source files for anything. The industry that postscript was built for moved on nearly 10 years ago.

I’m also still on Monterrey, but I just discovered that Skim supports viewing both PostScript and eps files (I assume that functionality also works on Ventura), so that could also be a solution if you don’t want to switch between machines for viewing ps files.

JFYI, you still have a CLI man-preview utility, which basically converts man page to PDF format.

I am one of those people who still have a lot of PostScript files. I have many scientific papers from college in my collection. I know I should convert them to PDF, but it sucks that they quietly removed support for a file format that's been around for a long time.

They did somewhat similar “feature releases” and “more” to the iWork suite many years ago. It probably still is a shadow of what it once was but TBH I stopped checking and moved on. Ironically preview had been filling some of its shortcomings for me. Yikes.

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