[HN Gopher] PostScript's sudden death in Sonoma
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PostScript's sudden death in Sonoma
Author : homarp
Score : 144 points
Date : 2023-09-25 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eclecticlight.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (eclecticlight.co)
| Aloha wrote:
| 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.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > 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')
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I jokingly thought the .ps format was used by computer science
| departments to punish Windows users, with the Ghostscript
| installation process being part of that conspiracy.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| pstuart wrote:
| 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.
| znpy wrote:
| Most likely an analysis of cost vs benefits resulted in a
| decision for deprecation first and removal later
| nraynaud wrote:
| I was thinking that a quick web app to convert your old EPS
| file might be a good way to execute the code in a sandbox. I
| don't know if we can get ghostscript to run in WASM
| flenserboy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/c
| onfiguring-...
| zeusk wrote:
| 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?
| brigade wrote:
| If there's one thing infosec types universally do not trust to
| improve security, it's sandboxing. Just look at all the
| discourse spilled over the recent WebP vulnerability.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Is suspect Apple's experience with Blastdoor[1] has made them
| unwilling to go that route.
|
| Blastdoor is meant to provide a secure sandbox for processing
| images and other data that arrives in iMessages. Puts all the
| potentially dangerous format decoders in a little box, and
| viciously kills anything that starts behaving odd when passed
| something to process. It certainly improved iOS security, but
| also quickly proved to be less than bulletproof, mostly due to
| just how much freedom older image formats provide.
|
| Ultimately code that isn't in the OS can't be exploited. Images
| decoders have a long history of being exploit vectors that are
| very hard to close. At a certain point simply not shipping them
| is the best course of action, doesn't prevent people from
| adding them later, but at least only those who need the
| functionality are in the firing line (which reduces the
| incentive for exploiting those formats, and indirectly ends up
| providing further protection to those that need to work with
| the formats).
|
| [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/28/messages-blastdoor-
| ios-...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zweifuss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| PostScript is also deprecated in PDF 2.0.
| koito17 wrote:
| 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.
| watersb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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/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://ma
| n.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)
| watersb wrote:
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| RIP PostScript. (Not to be confused with PostScript RIP.)
| andybak wrote:
| This is perfect. Not a single wasted syllable.
| watersb wrote:
| 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.
| hankman86 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| Angostura wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| GeekyBear wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| (deprecated)
| riffic wrote:
| (its)
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > (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...
|
| It's the end of an era.
| sroussey wrote:
| depreciated != deprecated
| Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote:
| I think they were correcting the spelling from depreciated
| to deprecated
| gjvc wrote:
| depreciation is what happens to you car. deprecation is
| what happens to file formats.
| fisherjeff wrote:
| True, unless Adobe considers PS support to be a fixed asset
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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)
| thelogicguy wrote:
| This was more relevant before CC but I still tend to include
| EPS in exports as a fallback option.
| mushufasa wrote:
| Absolutely. The standard for printing banners / logos on
| tables etc. at trade conferences is definitely still EPS,
| from my experience coordinating with conference planners in
| the last 3 years.
| favorited wrote:
| Presumably those print shops have a Photoshop license,
| which would mean they're unaffected by this.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| There's also a significant chunk of "I need to be able to
| open the back catalogue of customer artwork without
| worrying about whether something's shifted slightly."
| Import filters for opening legacy formats in newer
| software can be notoriously bad in that regard.
| ruined wrote:
| paper documents haven't significantly changed in the past
| forty years. consider eps feature complete
| dylan604 wrote:
| > I can't remember the last time I heard of someone
| voluntarily exporting to PS
|
| you'd be amazed at what people will do. i did the initial
| layout for a company's product labels in Illustrator with all
| files saved as *ai files. after the hand off, the person
| taking over the tasks ran into issues. they had no idea how
| to use Illustrator, and re-did the entire layout in
| Photoshop. when you only have a hammer, everything looks like
| a nail.
|
| so i can see someone trying to export as EPS because "it's
| vector" from something like photoshop.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Until recently I was using PostScript and EPS regularly.
| I'd use a PostScript program to step-and-repeat EPS artwork
| for a business form or raffle ticket, and apply consecutive
| numbers in the appropriate place. I'd then use GhostScript
| to render a final multi-page PDF for printing. I also used
| it to send artwork to an imagesetter. Yes, they're still
| used in some sectors, and while the RIP software we had
| supported PDF, I had much better control of the machine
| using PostScript with a PPD.
| IshKebab wrote:
| [flagged]
| mikestew wrote:
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/20610/why-are-
| nu...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Which of those answers do you think applies here?
| mikestew wrote:
| Doesn't have to apply at all, perhaps OP's job entails a
| lot of that style of writing, and it's just habit. Just
| like I still put a slash through zeroes (0) when writing
| by hand, even though I haven't coded on an IBM coding
| form in decades.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I do as well, plus the bar through the 7
| jiofj wrote:
| https://english.stackexchange.com/a/20620
| decasia wrote:
| 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.
| spandextwins wrote:
| 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...
| yankput wrote:
| There are many graphics editors that still support eps
| (Illustrator, Affinity stuff, Inkscape); the format is well
| described and as it basically does not move anymore, the
| existing convertors will work, like ghostscript (although the
| Affero GPL is annoying but thats not for this discussion)
|
| It's much better than to have docx or photoshop.
|
| It's just removed from the base OS for probably both licensing
| and security reasons.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I don't think Ghostscript is going anywhere. You should be able
| to use it
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Is anything stopping you from converting them to PDF?
| decasia wrote:
| Just that until now I didn't realize I would need to.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Why? Just install ghostscript, works fine?
| decasia wrote:
| 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.
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