9 ms·

PostScript’s sudden death in Sonoma

269 points by homarp 3y ago

CharlesW 3y ago
RIP PostScript. (Not to be confused with PostScript RIP.)
- andybak 3y ago
  This is perfect. Not a single wasted syllable.
- watersb 3y ago
  Oh, do I share the fun with those without grey hair... RIP = Raster Image Processor, often a standalone computer acting as a front-end for a printer. It accepts jobs, runs the PostScript, and converts it to a format native to the printer. At some point, it has to render a bitmap. Conceptually simple, but the frame buffer is going to be multiple megabytes. When PostScript was young, megabytes of RAM could require thousands of dollars. The CPU running PostScript was itself a rather powerful machine for the time. And then, the software license for the PostScript running on the RIP... I ran a network of 200 Macs, and for a number of years, the most powerful computer on that network was the printer.
  - somat 3y ago
    I have an sgi o2 that was originally the RIP for some sort of fancy print system. Which blew my mind. I mean sure the o2 was sort of the low end system of it's generation. But that is still a 10-20 thousand dollar computer. And you are wasting it on the infernal print queue. I sort of get it now, it's 1996, you have a million dollar printer, you want to make sure the computer assigned to handle the images can keep up with it, the o2 is probably a good fit. The other fun fact about the o2 is apparently the oil companies liked it. It is a unified memory architecture. On the one hand this means it's graphics were far slower than it's big brother, the octane, On the other the octane has at most 16 megabytes of video memory. you could get close to a gigabyte of memory in the o2 and and you could use as much of that for video memory as you could get away with. Great for those large geological survey visualizations.
    - watersb 3y ago
      I wondered if I were remembering correctly: an SGI O2 RIP for a huge HP inkjet poster printer. An advertising agency had such a setup for in-house production. 1998.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 3y ago
    At work, we still have EFI Fiery RIPs that feed huge color Konica Minolta digital printers.
- sacnoradhq 3y ago
  Those bastards! What ever will I do with my HP LaserJet 4 PostScript cartridge? It was perfectly usable!
pstuart 3y ago
One would think that Apple should be able to sandbox Preview to maintain functionality whilst avoiding security issues. Mac's native handling of PS has always been a slick differentiator -- seems a shame to throw that away.
- flenserboy 3y ago
  Sandboxing makes a lot of sense — perhaps virtualizing older macOS versions could give people what they need. Yet there is Ghostscript, which could also be run in a VM for extra security. It's a tool I still need in order to keep from distributing licensed fonts in PDFs — turning a PDF into PS, then back into a PDF, is a handy trick.
  - pstuart 3y ago
    Haven't played with Ghostscript in ages but will always have a soft spot for it. That said, using it (in a VM) as a workaround requires more steps and a bit more technical interaction that destroys the original seamless experience. Apple has been aggressive about tightening down the OS (still pissed that strace is neutered by default); taking the security approach of just not doing the work at all is really lame on their part. Theoretically they provide the ability to do just what I'm suggesting: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-the-macos-app-sandbox https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-...
    - zeusk 3y ago
      Well I guess they learned from Microsoft's mistakes and are lowering their exposure while their Mac install base is still low enough? It is getting ridiculous that I have to run multiple VMs for accessing old programs and data; but then at least I should be grateful we have functioning VMs?
- znpy 3y ago
  Most likely an analysis of cost vs benefits resulted in a decision for deprecation first and removal later
- 3y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
If I remember, PostScript had a fairly eye-watering licensing fee. I know that it added a great deal to the price of printers, if I got them with actual (as opposed to emulated) PS.
- mrighele 3y ago
  Was it only the license fees or the fact that (for the time at least) it required powerful hardware ? For example, if memory serves me right, at the time of the introduction the LaserWriter had a more powerful cpu than the Mac that it was supposed to go with.
  - nemo 3y ago
    The original Apple LaserWriter had a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 12 MHz, 512 KB of workspace RAM, and a 1 MB frame buffer. That wasn't cheap, but Adobe's pricing of the PostScript license was still very steep and contributed significantly to the high printer costs. Adobe's greed over licensing fees caused serious conflicts between Apple and Adobe.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      To give people an idea: that's 3x the RAM and about 2x the CPU power of the contemporary Macintosh (512k of ram (not expandable), and a 7.8MHz). It wasn't until the Macintosh II came out that there was a mac that was strictly more powerful than the LaserWriter, and by then the LaserWriter IINTX was available; similar CPU to the Mac II, but more base memory and could be expanded to more total memory.
  - zweifuss 3y ago
    Yes, until about 1995, a new laser printer could have a more powerful CPU and more RAM than a fairly common (even new) office computer driving it. That stopped at about Pentium 100 speed and 6 MB of RAM because normal use cases didn't need more than that.
layer8 3y ago
PostScript is also deprecated in PDF 2.0.
- ptx 3y ago
  What does this mean? Did the PDF standard include all of PostScript as part of it (I thought PDF was more like a subset?) or did it allow (but no longer allows) embedding PostScript objects?
  - layer8 3y ago
    Yes, parts (or all) of a PDF page could be expressed in PostScript as special objects. The separate (from PostScript) regular drawing primitives of PDF are inspired by PostScript, but those only form a sub-language within the PDF format, which adds enveloping structures and many other features.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
> I’m now starting to see warnings from third-party app developers that, in Sonoma, their apps will be unable to open or import EPS files, for example, as they can no longer convert them using Quartz in macOS 14. Although the impact on most of us should be very small or negligible, if you do still use EPS or PostScript at any scale, you will need to prepare a solution for continuing to do so after upgrading to Sonoma. I wish you success. I work with dozens of graphic designers and am quite certain that zero (0) of them know this is coming.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Do they actually deliver PS/EPS though? Based on industry standards I'm kind of assuming they all work with AI/PDF, and maybe SVG (but that's pretty specific to web rather than graphics design in general) if they're working with vector deliverables. I can't remember the last time I heard of someone voluntarily exporting to PS (and certainly not ever since PDF became an ISO standard 15 years ago)
  - Eric_WVGG 3y ago
    I get asked "what format do you want this in, EPS?" maybe a couple times a year. Some day I'd like to write a blog post about the peculiar relationship between designers/artists and technology… as a whole they seem to have an awful time moving on from the tools they were trained with. anecdote — I was chatting with one of the most famous book cover designers in the world a few years back, he was still using Quark X-Press 4 on a Mac that ran OS X with "Rosetta" (10.6?). These people are real and are the whole reason why Adobe.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      I don't think it's a training isuse. It's a "if something goes wrong with the output, it's my neck on the chopping block" issue. There is vanishingly little value in deviating from a known-good workflow until you have a good reason to.
      - 3y ago
decasia 3y ago
I have EPS files from 25 years ago that I still want to be able to open, these old graphics that help me remember my dad, a graphic designer. This sucks.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I don't think Ghostscript is going anywhere. You should be able to use it
- bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  Is anything stopping you from converting them to PDF?
  - decasia 3y ago
    Just that until now I didn't realize I would need to.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Why? Just install ghostscript, works fine?
- decasia 3y ago
  I looked just now and I actually have an EPS of something I drew on a mac SE in 1993. It's amazing how if you can manage not to lose all your files over time, they become an archaeology site documenting long stretches of your life.
  - erikerikson 3y ago
    See Ghostgum http://www.ghostgum.com.au/ http://www.ghostgum.com.au/
- spandextwins 3y ago
  Wow. That’s amazing. I have a bunch of Hollerith punched cards from my dad. I guess my kids will have a bunch of jpeg files from me…
Angostura 3y ago
I was really shocked when I found that Preview in Ventura would no longer open PS and EPS files a small but annoying reduction in quality of life for me
- dylan604 3y ago
  when preview stopped opening video files that had a codec other than ProRes or H.264, it just felt broken to me as well. for the longest time, one of the first things i'd add to any new OS install were the QT extensions of the other codecs. now, that's no longer supported.
  - concinds 3y ago
    I've heard QuickTime extensions will come back in Sonoma
    - tough 3y ago
      Do this no longer work? https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins https://github.com/Marginal/QLVideo https://github.com/Marginal/QLVideo
GeekyBear 3y ago
Adobe itself has deprecated PostScript in favor of it's PDF implementation, and has removed support for True Type and Type 1 Postscript fonts from their products. Fixed, thanks.
- andybak 3y ago
  (deprecated)
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > (deprecated) The font support? It was depreciated a couple of years ago and has been removed from current versions of the software as of this year. > As announced in January 2021, support for all Type 1 fonts in Adobe products is ended after January 2023. Users no longer have the ability to author content using Type 1 fonts in updated Adobe products. Adobe software will not recognize the presence of Type 1 fonts, even if you have Type 1 fonts installed in your desktop operating system: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end-of-support.html https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end... It's the end of an era.
    - sroussey 3y ago
      depreciated != deprecated
    - Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 3y ago
      I think they were correcting the spelling from depreciated to deprecated
    - gjvc 3y ago
      depreciation is what happens to you car. deprecation is what happens to file formats.
  - fisherjeff 3y ago
    True, unless Adobe considers PS support to be a fixed asset
Aloha 3y ago
The reaction to this is as if every computer on the planet is losing the ability to open with PS/EPS. PS/EPS were not native MacOS files until the infusion of NeXTSTEP code into MacOS in the form of OS X. I've lived in a mixed system world for a long time, opening PS/EPS on Windows has always required extra software. You can convert it on Linux easy enough, or just install Ghostscript on MacOS. Either way, the time of PS/EPS as a regular and common interchange data format is long gone.
- adastra22 3y ago
  It’s in the very first paragraph of the article: > If there’s one language that’s been at the heart of the Macintosh for the last 39 years it’s PostScript, the page description language developed by the founders of Adobe, the late John Warnock and Charles Geschke, and their team of engineers. It brought the Mac’s first commercial success in desktop publishing, in PostScript fonts, and early PostScript printers including Apple’s game-changing LaserWriter. Although Mac OS X never inherited NeXTStep’s Display PostScript, its descendant Quartz and Core Graphics are still based on PostScript’s relative PDF.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > PS/EPS were not native MacOS files until the infusion of NeXTSTEP code into MacOS in the form of OS X. I agree it’s probably not a big deal, but let’s be fair here. That was 22 years ago. Classic MacOS was only around for 17 (1984-2001). It’s a native format for macOS starting in 10.0 and prior to that an extra native format for NeXT starting in 1989 - when the macOS lineage began (note the lowercase ‘m’)
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > It’s a native format for macOS NextStep licensed Adobe's Display PostScript for it's graphics subsystem, but when MacOS was developed Apple replaced Display PostScript with an in house implementation of the open PDF spec that they called Quartz 2D. > Quartz 2D is available to all macOS and iOS application environments and provides resolution-independent and device-independent rendering of bitmap graphics, text, and vectors both on-screen and in preparation for printing. The drawing model utilized by Quartz 2D is based on PDF specification 1.4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D So now both Adobe and Apple have dropped PostScript in favor of PDF.
koito17 3y ago
This is very unfortunate. I've always found it annoying how Mac OS' Preview.app "natively" supports PostScript but will stubbornly convert it to a PDF and delete the original PS file. I do not have concrete statistics to back this up, but in my experience, a gzipped PostScript documentat is often smaller than an equivalent PDF, and unlike PDF, it's marginally easier to edit by hand after decompressing. Also, the PDFs created by Quartz PDFContext is often needlessly large and tools like pdftk have been able to losslessly compress them, whereas Quartz' own compression filter seems like the equivalent of JPEG compression at quality 0. The only practical advantage of PDF to me is the presence of an alpha channel, but that is basically it. With that said, PostScript documents themselves being a sort of program has always been a security nightmare for some, so I understand the removal on Apple's side. During the OS X Tiger days, I recall a simple infinite loop in PS could've stalled Preview's PS-to-PDF converter. Being able to properly sandbox PS seems like too much effort at this point given the ubiquity of PDF.
- toyg 3y ago
  > Mac OS' Preview.app "natively" supports PostScript but will stubbornly convert it to a PDF and delete the original PS file A "preVIEW" app that DELETES a file is an abomination that only Apple could ever get away with.
- chasil 3y ago
  > ...tools like pdftk have been able to losslessly compress them... I have had good luck with pdfsizeopt. https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt
watersb 3y ago
Apple is removing a number of scripting environments from OS X, so they won't have to maintain them. Not sure if they can remove Perl; it's tangled up in standard C libraries I think, and would be hard to kill.
- Someone 3y ago
  > Not sure if they can remove Perl; it's tangled up in standard C libraries I think Indeed. char *cmd = "/usr/bin/perl -e 'print join(chr(0), @ARGV), chr(0)' -- "; (https://github.com/Apple-FOSS-Mirror/Libc/blob/2ca2ae74647714acfc18674c3114b1a5d3325d7d/gen/wordexp.c#L192 https://github.com/Apple-FOSS-Mirror/Libc/blob/2ca2ae7464771...) That’s to implement wordexp, a POSIX function that probably is best avoided unless you really really need it. I think the sanest implementation would move lots of code from the shell into the standard C library, but that probably has its own problems, as FreeBSD does something similar. https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=wordexp&apropos=0&sektion=3&manpath=FreeBSD+15.0-CURRENT&arch=default&format=ascii https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=wordexp&apropos=0&...: ”IMPLEMENTATION NOTES The wordexp() function is implemented using the undocumented freebsd_wordexp shell built-in command.” OpenBSD actually has the sanest approach. “The only winning move is not to play.” or, in Theo’s words, “I think we should stand up to crap and not ever impliment it” (https://www.mail-archive.com/tech@openbsd.org/msg02325.html https://www.mail-archive.com/tech@openbsd.org/msg02325.html)
  - jrockway 3y ago
    This is probably a nice project to throw to a team at Apple that wants to ship something in Rust. Many years ago, you had to write the C library in C, but those days are over, and doing a bunch of string processing doesn't sound that fun. (If the code's already written, sure, keep it. But if you're writing brand new code to replace Perl oneliners, there are probably a lot of fun bugs you're going to add with a C rewrite.)
    - tedunangst 3y ago
      The problem is not the doing it in C, but the precisely matching the behavior of some existing code.
watersb 3y ago
Postscript is really easy to generate from shell scripts; I wrote a little thing that did labels for our (physical books) library. Not sure what I'd use for alternative. I'm sure there are many little modules that would help. Or I could just install Postscript. But it's nice to have things with fewer dependencies.
- blue1 3y ago
  SVG?
  - watersb 3y ago
    SVG would be the 21st century PostScript, yes. But... Output of SVG in actual print can be quite unpredictable. Of course, I'd stick to a particular implementation, and just aim for it to come out right. Should be pretty simple. Back when XML was the only way to go, there was a page-description language built on top. And it ultimately generates... PDF! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects
    - blue1 3y ago
      XSL-FO was a good idea, but it never went anywhere. Processors were costly and underfeatured, HTML+CSS ran circles around it. IIRC, XSL-FO didn't even have floats for a long time! It's a pity that there appears to be little interest for page-oriented features of CSS: breaks, headers, footers, numbering, etc. Most don't work well or at all.
hankman86 3y ago
They probably want to eliminate an attack vector. Removing PostScript support from WebKit/Safari seems like the right decision in light of PostScript’s waning relevance as a publishing format. Not sure about EPS - last I used it was for vector graphics within LaTeX documents. That was in the early 2000s. I am sure that applications targeting designers will integrate alternatives like Ghostscript soon enough.
- kergonath 3y ago
  > Not sure about EPS - last I used it was for vector graphics within LaTeX documents. That was in the early 2000s. People really should use pdflatex at the very least now. The original latex has too many issues and quirks.
  - readams 3y ago
    pdflatex doesn't really help here. pdflatex allows you to bypass dvi, the native TeX output format. The input for latex may well still include eps image files though.
    - stephen_g 3y ago
      True. Of course you can still use EPS, you just have to find another program to view them in. And isn’t there a tool in most TeX pakages that can convert it to PDF, then you should be able to use that at as an input if it makes it easier? I used to use PDF because you could easily export them from Illustrator and suck them straight in to xelatex or pdflatex (but this was years ago, so I can’t remember all the specifics)
    - kergonath 3y ago
      With pdflatex you can also directly use pdf files for things like figures, whilst standard latex requires postscript files. At least it was the case when it mattered to me, now I mostly moved to LuaLaTeX anyway for other reasons.
  - jabl 3y ago
    When I was in academia, I was among the first in our department that moved from latex to pdflatex. One of my motivations was that (E)PS files could be huge, particularly for bitmap graphics, whereas pdflatex supports PNG and JPEG as well as compression of PDF itself. That helped a lot when disk quotas at the time were very limited.
toddmorey 3y ago
Interestingly the entire NextStep UI was built on a graphics format called Display Postscript when Apple acquired it as the foundation of OS X https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  an idea that NeXT copied from Sun Microsystems NeWS
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    Is there a citation for that? I thought Adobe built this with NeXT separately but clearly Adobe would know of NeWS too.
    - sksksndodj 3y ago
      Here's a comment from 2016 that quotes technical discussions from 1988. It is clear that the Display Postscript implementers had detailed knowledge of NeWS. "In a few cases they picked the same names and operator spec as us, but in general they didn't try to be compatible. A few incompatibilities seem gratuitious to me." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520455
      - jjtheblunt 3y ago
        That’s interesting; thanks.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  The other thing that Apple did while developing OSX was to replace Display PostScript with an in-house implementation of Adobe's open PDF specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D
  - 3y ago
IOT_Apprentice 3y ago
[flagged]
omoikane 3y ago
Seems like PostScript is too powerful for the security conscious world. This is probably a good move. It's unfortunate though, I liked PostScript and all the stuff you can do with it[1]. What's the new standard for vector graphics going forward? SVG? glTF? [1] For example: https://uguu.org/src_udonge_ps.html https://uguu.org/src_udonge_ps.html
- jabl 3y ago
  PDF is the obvious successor. Though there are some things you can do with PS you can't do with PDF, because PDF AFAIU isn't a Turing complete language (though newer versions of PDF allow embedding of Javascript, IIRC).
  - merb 3y ago
    > (though newer versions of PDF allow embedding of Javascript, IIRC) Which comes with its own security issues/problems, especially since adobe is the leading figure of pdf viewing/processing. PDF 2.0 removed a lot of old crap, like xfa… and postscript but they kept JavaScript
tambourine_man 3y ago
Apple seems on a quest to make macOS less useful (removing unix languages, format support) in the hope that it will make it more secure and mantainable. I don't think the trade-offs are worth it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sacnoradhq 3y ago
  The enshitification of "progress" marches on under unquestioned faith that "newer is always better". And someone got impact credit on their next performance review for taking away functionality. Plus, Apple never listens to users.. they know it all and know better.
- toyg 3y ago
  > in the hope that it will make it more secure and mantainable. Or rather in the certainty that it will require less experienced manpower, i.e. will be cheaper.
donatj 3y ago
Hmm... I wonder if this is this why opening man pages with Preview suddenly stopped working in Monterey while ago?
- heyoni 3y ago
  I just opened a tax return document in pdf format and it looked fine but printed garbled text. That’s not what this is, right? The file wasn’t encrypted either.
sacnoradhq 3y ago
For reference, PS support for Preview was removed in Ventura.
IOT_Apprentice 3y ago
I asked mobile ChatGPT (free version) about rewriting PostScript in Rust. It indicated it would be a complex project, gave an overview and indicated it did not have access to the PostScript documentation (for some reason).
keepamovin 3y ago
If you want to convert a postscript file (or .eps) to PDF you can use ImageMagick: convert -density 300 input.ps -quality 100 output.pdf If you're interested in this kind of thing, I packaged a lot of functionality (including zip files) into an open source doc viewer called "chai" (that also works on mac, install deps via brew). Please note its focus is on security rather than looks so it converts docs to page images that you then view in (an optionally local) web client. You can easily modify the convert process to move it to PDF rather than page images tho. Check it out: https://github.com/dosyago/chai https://github.com/dosyago/chai
- jacobgorm 3y ago
  At a quick glance that looks like it will rasterize the vectors, which is usually not what you want to do with an EPS.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Good point! I will investigate that, even it's not relevant to my chai app I think it's interesting and worthwhile to know if the convert command will do that! edit: ChatGPT thinks you might be right! It also says: If you specifically need to maintain the vector properties of the EPS file when converting to PDF, you might want to use a tool designed to work with vector formats, such as epstopdf, which is a utility that comes with most TeX distributions.
    - chasil 3y ago
      TCPDF has full support for rendering an EPS into a PDF. It can be fussy. https://tcpdf.org/ https://tcpdf.org/
gardaani 3y ago
Apple should be more open about their removals. It isn't clear how this affects their CUPS implementation or PostScript printers https://github.com/apple/cups https://github.com/apple/cups
ribit 3y ago
About time. PDF has been a superior ad better supported alternative for over two decades. That some people still rely on this flawed thirty year old software is puzzling to me.
ben_w 3y ago
Sometimes I remember the way MIDI file playback disappeared from QuickTime, and then QuickTime itself disappeared. I'm not even sure when it happened. Last I tried I could still load them into GarageBand, but that app by itself is clunky and slow and 10x the size of the entire hard drive I was using back in the day, and the sound fonts feel all wrong anyway.
zzo38computer 3y ago
I don't use macOS so am unaffected, although I would think that they shouldn't need to support PostScript in the Preview. PostScript is not that good format for publishing and documents anyways (for, among other reasons, security), but it is good as a programming language. I still do often use PostScript, but I have Ghostscript and the graphical output of the program (if it has any; some of them don't) can be made in many file formats, including PNG, PDF, PCL, etc (it doesn't have SVG output, although that might be helpful if you are making diagrams). (There are some features I think would be good to add into PostScript, such as alpha transparency, auto-allocation (by specifying null where the object is expected; this is most useful for readline, in case you do not know the length of the input), a "unread" operator (like ungetc in C), being able to specify encodings separately from fonts, and others. Some features are in Ghostscript and are good to have, such as ARGUMENTS and %pipe%, and I do commonly use ARGUMENTS.) (PDF isn't good either though, but at least it is a format for publishing and documents, despite its problems.)
transfire 3y ago
Terrible and sad! I've come across issues on my Linux machine too. Gnome's Evince Document Viewer will display a Postscript file just fine, but printing just produces blank pages. Maybe it's a printer issue? But I have tried different printers. I use Postscript to generate labels. Much lighter weight than TeX and way easier to code than PDF. But now I have to convert them to PDF in order to print.

269 points by homarp 3y ago

CharlesW 3y ago

RIP PostScript. (Not to be confused with PostScript RIP.)

andybak 3y ago
This is perfect. Not a single wasted syllable.
watersb 3y ago
Oh, do I share the fun with those without grey hair... RIP = Raster Image Processor, often a standalone computer acting as a front-end for a printer. It accepts jobs, runs the PostScript, and converts it to a format native to the printer. At some point, it has to render a bitmap. Conceptually simple, but the frame buffer is going to be multiple megabytes. When PostScript was young, megabytes of RAM could require thousands of dollars. The CPU running PostScript was itself a rather powerful machine for the time. And then, the software license for the PostScript running on the RIP... I ran a network of 200 Macs, and for a number of years, the most powerful computer on that network was the printer.
- somat 3y ago
  I have an sgi o2 that was originally the RIP for some sort of fancy print system. Which blew my mind. I mean sure the o2 was sort of the low end system of it's generation. But that is still a 10-20 thousand dollar computer. And you are wasting it on the infernal print queue. I sort of get it now, it's 1996, you have a million dollar printer, you want to make sure the computer assigned to handle the images can keep up with it, the o2 is probably a good fit. The other fun fact about the o2 is apparently the oil companies liked it. It is a unified memory architecture. On the one hand this means it's graphics were far slower than it's big brother, the octane, On the other the octane has at most 16 megabytes of video memory. you could get close to a gigabyte of memory in the o2 and and you could use as much of that for video memory as you could get away with. Great for those large geological survey visualizations.
  - watersb 3y ago
    I wondered if I were remembering correctly: an SGI O2 RIP for a huge HP inkjet poster printer. An advertising agency had such a setup for in-house production. 1998.
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y ago
  At work, we still have EFI Fiery RIPs that feed huge color Konica Minolta digital printers.
sacnoradhq 3y ago
Those bastards! What ever will I do with my HP LaserJet 4 PostScript cartridge? It was perfectly usable!

pstuart 3y ago

One would think that Apple should be able to sandbox Preview to maintain functionality whilst avoiding security issues. Mac's native handling of PS has always been a slick differentiator -- seems a shame to throw that away.

flenserboy 3y ago
Sandboxing makes a lot of sense — perhaps virtualizing older macOS versions could give people what they need. Yet there is Ghostscript, which could also be run in a VM for extra security. It's a tool I still need in order to keep from distributing licensed fonts in PDFs — turning a PDF into PS, then back into a PDF, is a handy trick.
- pstuart 3y ago
  Haven't played with Ghostscript in ages but will always have a soft spot for it. That said, using it (in a VM) as a workaround requires more steps and a bit more technical interaction that destroys the original seamless experience. Apple has been aggressive about tightening down the OS (still pissed that strace is neutered by default); taking the security approach of just not doing the work at all is really lame on their part. Theoretically they provide the ability to do just what I'm suggesting: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-the-macos-app-sandbox https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-...
  - zeusk 3y ago
    Well I guess they learned from Microsoft's mistakes and are lowering their exposure while their Mac install base is still low enough? It is getting ridiculous that I have to run multiple VMs for accessing old programs and data; but then at least I should be grateful we have functioning VMs?
znpy 3y ago
Most likely an analysis of cost vs benefits resulted in a decision for deprecation first and removal later
3y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

If I remember, PostScript had a fairly eye-watering licensing fee. I know that it added a great deal to the price of printers, if I got them with actual (as opposed to emulated) PS.

mrighele 3y ago
Was it only the license fees or the fact that (for the time at least) it required powerful hardware ? For example, if memory serves me right, at the time of the introduction the LaserWriter had a more powerful cpu than the Mac that it was supposed to go with.
- nemo 3y ago
  The original Apple LaserWriter had a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 12 MHz, 512 KB of workspace RAM, and a 1 MB frame buffer. That wasn't cheap, but Adobe's pricing of the PostScript license was still very steep and contributed significantly to the high printer costs. Adobe's greed over licensing fees caused serious conflicts between Apple and Adobe.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    To give people an idea: that's 3x the RAM and about 2x the CPU power of the contemporary Macintosh (512k of ram (not expandable), and a 7.8MHz). It wasn't until the Macintosh II came out that there was a mac that was strictly more powerful than the LaserWriter, and by then the LaserWriter IINTX was available; similar CPU to the Mac II, but more base memory and could be expanded to more total memory.
- zweifuss 3y ago
  Yes, until about 1995, a new laser printer could have a more powerful CPU and more RAM than a fairly common (even new) office computer driving it. That stopped at about Pentium 100 speed and 6 MB of RAM because normal use cases didn't need more than that.

layer8 3y ago

PostScript is also deprecated in PDF 2.0.

ptx 3y ago
What does this mean? Did the PDF standard include all of PostScript as part of it (I thought PDF was more like a subset?) or did it allow (but no longer allows) embedding PostScript objects?
- layer8 3y ago
  Yes, parts (or all) of a PDF page could be expressed in PostScript as special objects. The separate (from PostScript) regular drawing primitives of PDF are inspired by PostScript, but those only form a sub-language within the PDF format, which adds enveloping structures and many other features.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Eric_WVGG 3y ago

> I’m now starting to see warnings from third-party app developers that, in Sonoma, their apps will be unable to open or import EPS files, for example, as they can no longer convert them using Quartz in macOS 14. Although the impact on most of us should be very small or negligible, if you do still use EPS or PostScript at any scale, you will need to prepare a solution for continuing to do so after upgrading to Sonoma. I wish you success. I work with dozens of graphic designers and am quite certain that zero (0) of them know this is coming.

TheRealPomax 3y ago
Do they actually deliver PS/EPS though? Based on industry standards I'm kind of assuming they all work with AI/PDF, and maybe SVG (but that's pretty specific to web rather than graphics design in general) if they're working with vector deliverables. I can't remember the last time I heard of someone voluntarily exporting to PS (and certainly not ever since PDF became an ISO standard 15 years ago)
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  I get asked "what format do you want this in, EPS?" maybe a couple times a year. Some day I'd like to write a blog post about the peculiar relationship between designers/artists and technology… as a whole they seem to have an awful time moving on from the tools they were trained with. anecdote — I was chatting with one of the most famous book cover designers in the world a few years back, he was still using Quark X-Press 4 on a Mac that ran OS X with "Rosetta" (10.6?). These people are real and are the whole reason why Adobe.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    I don't think it's a training isuse. It's a "if something goes wrong with the output, it's my neck on the chopping block" issue. There is vanishingly little value in deviating from a known-good workflow until you have a good reason to.
    - 3y ago

decasia 3y ago

I have EPS files from 25 years ago that I still want to be able to open, these old graphics that help me remember my dad, a graphic designer. This sucks.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I don't think Ghostscript is going anywhere. You should be able to use it
bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
Is anything stopping you from converting them to PDF?
- decasia 3y ago
  Just that until now I didn't realize I would need to.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Why? Just install ghostscript, works fine?
decasia 3y ago
I looked just now and I actually have an EPS of something I drew on a mac SE in 1993. It's amazing how if you can manage not to lose all your files over time, they become an archaeology site documenting long stretches of your life.
- erikerikson 3y ago
  See Ghostgum http://www.ghostgum.com.au/ http://www.ghostgum.com.au/
spandextwins 3y ago
Wow. That’s amazing. I have a bunch of Hollerith punched cards from my dad. I guess my kids will have a bunch of jpeg files from me…

Angostura 3y ago

I was really shocked when I found that Preview in Ventura would no longer open PS and EPS files a small but annoying reduction in quality of life for me

dylan604 3y ago
when preview stopped opening video files that had a codec other than ProRes or H.264, it just felt broken to me as well. for the longest time, one of the first things i'd add to any new OS install were the QT extensions of the other codecs. now, that's no longer supported.
- concinds 3y ago
  I've heard QuickTime extensions will come back in Sonoma
  - tough 3y ago
    Do this no longer work? https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins https://github.com/Marginal/QLVideo https://github.com/Marginal/QLVideo

GeekyBear 3y ago

Adobe itself has deprecated PostScript in favor of it's PDF implementation, and has removed support for True Type and Type 1 Postscript fonts from their products. Fixed, thanks.

andybak 3y ago
(deprecated)
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > (deprecated) The font support? It was depreciated a couple of years ago and has been removed from current versions of the software as of this year. > As announced in January 2021, support for all Type 1 fonts in Adobe products is ended after January 2023. Users no longer have the ability to author content using Type 1 fonts in updated Adobe products. Adobe software will not recognize the presence of Type 1 fonts, even if you have Type 1 fonts installed in your desktop operating system: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end-of-support.html https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end... It's the end of an era.
  - sroussey 3y ago
    depreciated != deprecated
  - Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 3y ago
    I think they were correcting the spelling from depreciated to deprecated
  - gjvc 3y ago
    depreciation is what happens to you car. deprecation is what happens to file formats.
- fisherjeff 3y ago
  True, unless Adobe considers PS support to be a fixed asset

Aloha 3y ago

The reaction to this is as if every computer on the planet is losing the ability to open with PS/EPS. PS/EPS were not native MacOS files until the infusion of NeXTSTEP code into MacOS in the form of OS X. I've lived in a mixed system world for a long time, opening PS/EPS on Windows has always required extra software. You can convert it on Linux easy enough, or just install Ghostscript on MacOS. Either way, the time of PS/EPS as a regular and common interchange data format is long gone.

adastra22 3y ago
It’s in the very first paragraph of the article: > If there’s one language that’s been at the heart of the Macintosh for the last 39 years it’s PostScript, the page description language developed by the founders of Adobe, the late John Warnock and Charles Geschke, and their team of engineers. It brought the Mac’s first commercial success in desktop publishing, in PostScript fonts, and early PostScript printers including Apple’s game-changing LaserWriter. Although Mac OS X never inherited NeXTStep’s Display PostScript, its descendant Quartz and Core Graphics are still based on PostScript’s relative PDF.
arcticbull 3y ago
> PS/EPS were not native MacOS files until the infusion of NeXTSTEP code into MacOS in the form of OS X. I agree it’s probably not a big deal, but let’s be fair here. That was 22 years ago. Classic MacOS was only around for 17 (1984-2001). It’s a native format for macOS starting in 10.0 and prior to that an extra native format for NeXT starting in 1989 - when the macOS lineage began (note the lowercase ‘m’)
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > It’s a native format for macOS NextStep licensed Adobe's Display PostScript for it's graphics subsystem, but when MacOS was developed Apple replaced Display PostScript with an in house implementation of the open PDF spec that they called Quartz 2D. > Quartz 2D is available to all macOS and iOS application environments and provides resolution-independent and device-independent rendering of bitmap graphics, text, and vectors both on-screen and in preparation for printing. The drawing model utilized by Quartz 2D is based on PDF specification 1.4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D So now both Adobe and Apple have dropped PostScript in favor of PDF.

koito17 3y ago

This is very unfortunate. I've always found it annoying how Mac OS' Preview.app "natively" supports PostScript but will stubbornly convert it to a PDF and delete the original PS file. I do not have concrete statistics to back this up, but in my experience, a gzipped PostScript documentat is often smaller than an equivalent PDF, and unlike PDF, it's marginally easier to edit by hand after decompressing. Also, the PDFs created by Quartz PDFContext is often needlessly large and tools like pdftk have been able to losslessly compress them, whereas Quartz' own compression filter seems like the equivalent of JPEG compression at quality 0. The only practical advantage of PDF to me is the presence of an alpha channel, but that is basically it. With that said, PostScript documents themselves being a sort of program has always been a security nightmare for some, so I understand the removal on Apple's side. During the OS X Tiger days, I recall a simple infinite loop in PS could've stalled Preview's PS-to-PDF converter. Being able to properly sandbox PS seems like too much effort at this point given the ubiquity of PDF.

toyg 3y ago
> Mac OS' Preview.app "natively" supports PostScript but will stubbornly convert it to a PDF and delete the original PS file A "preVIEW" app that DELETES a file is an abomination that only Apple could ever get away with.
chasil 3y ago
> ...tools like pdftk have been able to losslessly compress them... I have had good luck with pdfsizeopt. https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt

watersb 3y ago

Apple is removing a number of scripting environments from OS X, so they won't have to maintain them. Not sure if they can remove Perl; it's tangled up in standard C libraries I think, and would be hard to kill.

Someone 3y ago
> Not sure if they can remove Perl; it's tangled up in standard C libraries I think Indeed. char *cmd = "/usr/bin/perl -e 'print join(chr(0), @ARGV), chr(0)' -- "; (https://github.com/Apple-FOSS-Mirror/Libc/blob/2ca2ae74647714acfc18674c3114b1a5d3325d7d/gen/wordexp.c#L192 https://github.com/Apple-FOSS-Mirror/Libc/blob/2ca2ae7464771...) That’s to implement wordexp, a POSIX function that probably is best avoided unless you really really need it. I think the sanest implementation would move lots of code from the shell into the standard C library, but that probably has its own problems, as FreeBSD does something similar. https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=wordexp&apropos=0&sektion=3&manpath=FreeBSD+15.0-CURRENT&arch=default&format=ascii https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=wordexp&apropos=0&...: ”IMPLEMENTATION NOTES The wordexp() function is implemented using the undocumented freebsd_wordexp shell built-in command.” OpenBSD actually has the sanest approach. “The only winning move is not to play.” or, in Theo’s words, “I think we should stand up to crap and not ever impliment it” (https://www.mail-archive.com/tech@openbsd.org/msg02325.html https://www.mail-archive.com/tech@openbsd.org/msg02325.html)
- jrockway 3y ago
  This is probably a nice project to throw to a team at Apple that wants to ship something in Rust. Many years ago, you had to write the C library in C, but those days are over, and doing a bunch of string processing doesn't sound that fun. (If the code's already written, sure, keep it. But if you're writing brand new code to replace Perl oneliners, there are probably a lot of fun bugs you're going to add with a C rewrite.)
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    The problem is not the doing it in C, but the precisely matching the behavior of some existing code.

watersb 3y ago

Postscript is really easy to generate from shell scripts; I wrote a little thing that did labels for our (physical books) library. Not sure what I'd use for alternative. I'm sure there are many little modules that would help. Or I could just install Postscript. But it's nice to have things with fewer dependencies.

blue1 3y ago
SVG?
- watersb 3y ago
  SVG would be the 21st century PostScript, yes. But... Output of SVG in actual print can be quite unpredictable. Of course, I'd stick to a particular implementation, and just aim for it to come out right. Should be pretty simple. Back when XML was the only way to go, there was a page-description language built on top. And it ultimately generates... PDF! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects
  - blue1 3y ago
    XSL-FO was a good idea, but it never went anywhere. Processors were costly and underfeatured, HTML+CSS ran circles around it. IIRC, XSL-FO didn't even have floats for a long time! It's a pity that there appears to be little interest for page-oriented features of CSS: breaks, headers, footers, numbering, etc. Most don't work well or at all.

hankman86 3y ago

They probably want to eliminate an attack vector. Removing PostScript support from WebKit/Safari seems like the right decision in light of PostScript’s waning relevance as a publishing format. Not sure about EPS - last I used it was for vector graphics within LaTeX documents. That was in the early 2000s. I am sure that applications targeting designers will integrate alternatives like Ghostscript soon enough.

kergonath 3y ago
> Not sure about EPS - last I used it was for vector graphics within LaTeX documents. That was in the early 2000s. People really should use pdflatex at the very least now. The original latex has too many issues and quirks.
- readams 3y ago
  pdflatex doesn't really help here. pdflatex allows you to bypass dvi, the native TeX output format. The input for latex may well still include eps image files though.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    True. Of course you can still use EPS, you just have to find another program to view them in. And isn’t there a tool in most TeX pakages that can convert it to PDF, then you should be able to use that at as an input if it makes it easier? I used to use PDF because you could easily export them from Illustrator and suck them straight in to xelatex or pdflatex (but this was years ago, so I can’t remember all the specifics)
  - kergonath 3y ago
    With pdflatex you can also directly use pdf files for things like figures, whilst standard latex requires postscript files. At least it was the case when it mattered to me, now I mostly moved to LuaLaTeX anyway for other reasons.
- jabl 3y ago
  When I was in academia, I was among the first in our department that moved from latex to pdflatex. One of my motivations was that (E)PS files could be huge, particularly for bitmap graphics, whereas pdflatex supports PNG and JPEG as well as compression of PDF itself. That helped a lot when disk quotas at the time were very limited.

toddmorey 3y ago

Interestingly the entire NextStep UI was built on a graphics format called Display Postscript when Apple acquired it as the foundation of OS X https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
an idea that NeXT copied from Sun Microsystems NeWS
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  Is there a citation for that? I thought Adobe built this with NeXT separately but clearly Adobe would know of NeWS too.
  - sksksndodj 3y ago
    Here's a comment from 2016 that quotes technical discussions from 1988. It is clear that the Display Postscript implementers had detailed knowledge of NeWS. "In a few cases they picked the same names and operator spec as us, but in general they didn't try to be compatible. A few incompatibilities seem gratuitious to me." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520455
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      That’s interesting; thanks.
GeekyBear 3y ago
The other thing that Apple did while developing OSX was to replace Display PostScript with an in-house implementation of Adobe's open PDF specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D
- 3y ago

IOT_Apprentice 3y ago

[flagged]

omoikane 3y ago

Seems like PostScript is too powerful for the security conscious world. This is probably a good move. It's unfortunate though, I liked PostScript and all the stuff you can do with it[1]. What's the new standard for vector graphics going forward? SVG? glTF? [1] For example: https://uguu.org/src_udonge_ps.html https://uguu.org/src_udonge_ps.html

jabl 3y ago
PDF is the obvious successor. Though there are some things you can do with PS you can't do with PDF, because PDF AFAIU isn't a Turing complete language (though newer versions of PDF allow embedding of Javascript, IIRC).
- merb 3y ago
  > (though newer versions of PDF allow embedding of Javascript, IIRC) Which comes with its own security issues/problems, especially since adobe is the leading figure of pdf viewing/processing. PDF 2.0 removed a lot of old crap, like xfa… and postscript but they kept JavaScript

tambourine_man 3y ago

Apple seems on a quest to make macOS less useful (removing unix languages, format support) in the hope that it will make it more secure and mantainable. I don't think the trade-offs are worth it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sacnoradhq 3y ago
The enshitification of "progress" marches on under unquestioned faith that "newer is always better". And someone got impact credit on their next performance review for taking away functionality. Plus, Apple never listens to users.. they know it all and know better.
toyg 3y ago
> in the hope that it will make it more secure and mantainable. Or rather in the certainty that it will require less experienced manpower, i.e. will be cheaper.

donatj 3y ago

Hmm... I wonder if this is this why opening man pages with Preview suddenly stopped working in Monterey while ago?

heyoni 3y ago
I just opened a tax return document in pdf format and it looked fine but printed garbled text. That’s not what this is, right? The file wasn’t encrypted either.

sacnoradhq 3y ago

For reference, PS support for Preview was removed in Ventura.

IOT_Apprentice 3y ago

I asked mobile ChatGPT (free version) about rewriting PostScript in Rust. It indicated it would be a complex project, gave an overview and indicated it did not have access to the PostScript documentation (for some reason).

keepamovin 3y ago

If you want to convert a postscript file (or .eps) to PDF you can use ImageMagick: convert -density 300 input.ps -quality 100 output.pdf If you're interested in this kind of thing, I packaged a lot of functionality (including zip files) into an open source doc viewer called "chai" (that also works on mac, install deps via brew). Please note its focus is on security rather than looks so it converts docs to page images that you then view in (an optionally local) web client. You can easily modify the convert process to move it to PDF rather than page images tho. Check it out: https://github.com/dosyago/chai https://github.com/dosyago/chai

jacobgorm 3y ago
At a quick glance that looks like it will rasterize the vectors, which is usually not what you want to do with an EPS.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Good point! I will investigate that, even it's not relevant to my chai app I think it's interesting and worthwhile to know if the convert command will do that! edit: ChatGPT thinks you might be right! It also says: If you specifically need to maintain the vector properties of the EPS file when converting to PDF, you might want to use a tool designed to work with vector formats, such as epstopdf, which is a utility that comes with most TeX distributions.
  - chasil 3y ago
    TCPDF has full support for rendering an EPS into a PDF. It can be fussy. https://tcpdf.org/ https://tcpdf.org/

gardaani 3y ago

Apple should be more open about their removals. It isn't clear how this affects their CUPS implementation or PostScript printers https://github.com/apple/cups https://github.com/apple/cups

ribit 3y ago

About time. PDF has been a superior ad better supported alternative for over two decades. That some people still rely on this flawed thirty year old software is puzzling to me.

ben_w 3y ago

Sometimes I remember the way MIDI file playback disappeared from QuickTime, and then QuickTime itself disappeared. I'm not even sure when it happened. Last I tried I could still load them into GarageBand, but that app by itself is clunky and slow and 10x the size of the entire hard drive I was using back in the day, and the sound fonts feel all wrong anyway.

zzo38computer 3y ago

I don't use macOS so am unaffected, although I would think that they shouldn't need to support PostScript in the Preview. PostScript is not that good format for publishing and documents anyways (for, among other reasons, security), but it is good as a programming language. I still do often use PostScript, but I have Ghostscript and the graphical output of the program (if it has any; some of them don't) can be made in many file formats, including PNG, PDF, PCL, etc (it doesn't have SVG output, although that might be helpful if you are making diagrams). (There are some features I think would be good to add into PostScript, such as alpha transparency, auto-allocation (by specifying null where the object is expected; this is most useful for readline, in case you do not know the length of the input), a "unread" operator (like ungetc in C), being able to specify encodings separately from fonts, and others. Some features are in Ghostscript and are good to have, such as ARGUMENTS and %pipe%, and I do commonly use ARGUMENTS.) (PDF isn't good either though, but at least it is a format for publishing and documents, despite its problems.)

transfire 3y ago

Terrible and sad! I've come across issues on my Linux machine too. Gnome's Evince Document Viewer will display a Postscript file just fine, but printing just produces blank pages. Maybe it's a printer issue? But I have tried different printers. I use Postscript to generate labels. Much lighter weight than TeX and way easier to code than PDF. But now I have to convert them to PDF in order to print.