[R-SIG-Mac] macOS Ventura (13) Preview App Drops Support for PS/EPS File Rendering

[Marc Schwartz]

Hi Prof. Ripley,

Thanks for your reply. Responses inline below.

On October 25, 2022 at 11:11:43 PM, Prof Brian Ripley (ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk) wrote:
> Somehow you sent HTML only, and that renders oddly in Thunderbird.

My apologies on that. 

That is curious and I now see that in looking at the raw message content. I am not sure how that occurred, as I had set the e-mail to plain text when composing, so somehow that changed at some point. What is even more confusing, is that by default, had the e-mail been initially composed as HTML/RTF, it would normally be sent as multipart MIME, which does not appear to have been the case here, leaving me even more confused.

I am sending this now as plain text, so hopefully that is what is sent. I will keep track and if that is not the case, report a bug.

> Have you considered GhostScript? That used to be my viewer of choice
> for Postscript long ago. I think TeXShop may be a wrapper.

Yes, TeXShop is a GUI front-end previewer as you note below, included in the macTeX distribution, using underlying functionality. Ghostscript 9.55 is also installed as part of macTeX, which I have installed as I still heavily use Sweave to generate PDF reports for clients, some of which use ps-tricks to generate flow chart figures. Thus, the included figure content is generated as PDF and PS/EPS files, which I sometimes quickly preview, until now, using macOS Preview.

There is some coverage now of this change in Preview in various Mac fora, with some hypothesizing that this change in Preview may be security related, pointing to a change by Microsoft in Office back in 2017/2018:

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

Of course, nothing official from Apple that I have seen.

> My box has Photoshop as the default viewer for .eps and TeXShop for .ps.
> I almost never use Photoshop: it comes as part of Adobe's
> Photographers Bundle.

I also have the full Adobe Acrobat application installed, as I have other functionality provided by that app that I need, so pay for that as a business expense.

It is interesting that now that I am trying to open some PS/EPS files with apps other than Preview, if I use TeXShop, the file opens right away, whereas if I use Acrobat, I get a security pop-up asking me if I trust the source that generated the file, which in this case, is me. Perhaps Apple could take a similar approach with Preview, if security was the motivation for this change, and they elect to revert it.

This was more of a heads up for folks, who like me, have been dependent upon using Preview for a quick look at these files, which are commonly generated using R.

Thanks and regards,

Marc


> Brian
>  
> On 26/10/2022 01:06, Marc Schwartz via R-SIG-Mac wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Having updated to macOS Ventura, I just became aware that Ventura's
> > Preview app has dropped support for rendering PS and EPS files after all
> > these years.
> >
> > Not clear on the rationale for this change, but there is an Apple
> > Support article here on this:
> >
> > https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213250
> >
> > Apparently, one can still print these files by dragging and dropping
> > them on to the printer queue, but you will need to find a different
> > application, such as the TeXShop app, which is bundled in macTeX for
> > free, or another option is the full Adobe Acrobat Pro application, if
> > you have and pay for that.
> >
> > If you are so inclined, you can provide product feedback to Apple here:
> >
> > https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Marc Schwartz
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> > R-SIG-Mac using r-project.org
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>  
> --
> Brian D. Ripley, ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk
> Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
>  
>