PostScript is dead

[steve123]

The most famous one is CUPS-PDF

I used CUPS-PDF for years successfully from VM's and WINE. Unfortunately, CUPS-PDF no longer works with Sonoma. I did find a brew formula for installing CUPS so maybe this will fix the issue?

GitHub - OpenPrinting/cups: OpenPrinting CUPS Sources

OpenPrinting CUPS Sources. Contribute to OpenPrinting/cups development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

The interoperability of VMs and WINE with the Mac's printing system is not entirely Apple's responsibility, is it?

I suppose that is debatable but my position on this matter is Apple does have responsibility. Apple worked many years ago to bring Windows users over to OS X. I suggest Apple needs to make some effort to not impose unnecessary friction since part of the reason the users came over in the first place was because there was minimal friction to adopt OS X. Some of those users may still rely on the ability to run some very old but useful Windows applications That were "part of the deal".

 

[CasualFanboy]

Did Apple ever offer an explanation why they removed postscript? This problem also affects applications run with Wine.

iPhone users don't think it's important. Not sure if that was the officially announced reason, but that's why.

 

[Moof1904]

And flown it has! Remember when camera ready-laser printing was so exotic and expensive that only successful newspapers and press shops could afford it? Dedicated output bureaus? An 11 X 17 full bleed laser imager (the laser/mechanical portion) might cost @ $10,000 US, and the PostScript RIP would cost another 10... For 600 DPI! 🎵 Agfa. Scitex. Linotype. Those were the dayyyyyssss 🎶

I always preferred Macromedia Freehand, although I liked the rest of Adobe's suite. I liked PageMaker instead Quark XPress, so I never quite warmed up to InDesign. Workflow automation wasn't my Agency's thing.

I made a smooth transition to Affinity Designer, which reminds me of Freehand. One feature I miss a lot is bitmap autotrace. I still do a lot of artwork in ink, because I'm very fast when I get in my groove. And sometimes customers bring in hardcopy of products done so long ago, the files would be useless. Also, color separations would be nice; There is still a light demand for low end spot color.

Affinity Publisher is Quarky-InDesigny, so meh. Affinity Photo is a totally viable replacement for Photoshop; little behind the curve on fancy AI filtering. Let's face it, there's a reason Adobe is an 800 lbs gorilla in the market.

I don't do graphics commercially, much, anymore. In 1997, I made a hard turn into IT and Security. Left professional graphics behind. Still noodle around for charities and volunteering.

I was on the FreeHand development team when Altsys created it (along with Fontographer) and Aldus marketed and supported it. Then, because Adobe bought Aldus, there was a legal battle to pull FreeHand back from Adobe before they could kill it. Altsys won the leal battle and got FreeHand back and we at Altsys were gearing up to release Altsys FreeHand when Macromedia acquired Altsys and eventually killed FreeHand anyway because they were all about the web by then.

 

[ipaqrat]

I was on the FreeHand development team when Altsys created it (along with Fontographer) and Aldus marketed and supported it. Then, because Adobe bought Aldus, there was a legal battle to pull FreeHand back from Adobe before they could kill it. Altsys won the leal battle and got FreeHand back and we at Altsys were gearing up to release Altsys FreeHand when Macromedia acquired Altsys and eventually killed FreeHand anyway because they were all about the web by then.

Thank you for your service! 🏆 I believe Freehand was the most intuitive of all the apps at the high-power end of the market. The feature set was so "discoverable." Freehand remained a viable, if not aggressively enhanced, product, even under Adobe's ownership. I used version 11, aka "MX", until 2009.

I finally got tired of screwing with VMs and Rosetta to support it, as I was just dabbling with pro-bono work by that time. Illustrator simply does not feel as smooth and easy; it is fatiguing to use - like Apple's consumer-grade apps: something is off, unfinished, illogical, needlessly complicated.

Acquiring Macromedia was a golden goose for Adobe. Though in my (then) new role in IT Security Engineering, Flash was a constantly vile hemorrhoid, though PDFs were not far behind.

I've been trolling for YEARS for an app that worked as well as FreeHand. Then, mmmmayyybeeee Affinity Designer was onto something (particularly since Affinity Photo, with its personas, behaves a bit like XRES) (Coincidence?)... Then CANVA bought Affinity, and now I have TPGDS (traumatic post graphic designer syndrome) all over again 🎨✏️ 🍺💊

 

[Moof1904]

Thank you for your service! 🏆 I believe Freehand was the most intuitive of all the apps at the high-power end of the market. The feature set was so "discoverable." Freehand remained a viable, if not aggressively enhanced, product, even under Adobe's ownership. I used version 11, aka "MX", until 2009.

I finally got tired of screwing with VMs and Rosetta to support it, as I was just dabbling with pro-bono work by that time. Illustrator simply does not feel as smooth and easy; it is fatiguing to use - like Apple's consumer-grade apps: something is off, unfinished, illogical, needlessly complicated.

Acquiring Macromedia was a golden goose for Adobe. Though in my (then) new role in IT Security Engineering, Flash was a constantly vile hemorrhoid, though PDFs were not far behind.

I've been trolling for YEARS for an app that worked as well as FreeHand. Then, mmmmayyybeeee Affinity Designer was onto something (particularly since Affinity Photo, with its personas, behaves a bit like XRES) (Coincidence?)... Then CANVA bought Affinity, and now I have TPGDS (traumatic post graphic designer syndrome) all over again 🎨✏️ 🍺💊

I was still at Macromedia when they acquired xRes. There were some great people brought into Macromedia by that acquisition but Macromedia killed xRes so quickly after one release (maybe two), that I still don’t know why they bothered spending so much money to buy it. The founders of xRes, brothers Freddy and Richard Krueger (no joke), laughed all the way to the bank.

 

[benwiggy]

I did find a brew formula for installing CUPS so maybe this will fix the issue?

You don't need to install CUPS. That comes with the OS. CUPS and CUPS-PDF are two different things.

I don't know why CUPS-PDF doesn't work -- despite Apple's best security efforts, my minimal print-to-file implementation still works.

CUPS does plan to do away with backends, filters, drivers and PPDs at some point (they are currently deprecated), and after that it will all be Airprint IPprinting magic woo.

 

[jdw13]

If you use macports or any other toolset to port unix programs to your Mac, you can use a2ps-lpr-wrapper to send PostScript file directly to your printer. I like to 'pretty-print' using a2ps and then print the created PostScript file with the a2ps-lpr-wrapper. I think Acrobat Distiller will also work to convert PostScript to PDF for printing.

 

[benwiggy]

If you use macports or any other toolset to port unix programs to your Mac, you can use a2ps-lpr-wrapper to send PostScript file directly to your printer. I like to 'pretty-print' using a2ps and then print the created PostScript file with the a2ps-lpr-wrapper. I think Acrobat Distiller will also work to convert PostScript to PDF for printing.

You can still send PS directly to a printer.

 

[bzgnyc2]

You can still send PS directly to a printer.

For the person who revived what was your original thread, I think the issue was that enscript/a2ps only generates PostScript but Apple has mostly deprecated PostScript in favor PDF. Preview can no longer read PostScript directly (so can't pipe into it, etc) nor does the print system render PostScript for non-PostScript printers like a typical inkjet.

Unfortunately the UNIX command-line has not kept up. PostScript was the de facto API for printing under UNIX for a long time and a lot of program just generated and piped raw PostScript to the print system. Programs like vim and enscript/a2ps are still hardwired to PostScript and I don't see any complete alternatives updated to generate PDF.

There are more basic text to PDF converters and of course PostScript2PDF conversion via GhostScript but all seem like a kludge/workaround to high-fidelity solutions that worked smoothly and seemlessly.

P.S.A few weeks ago I would have said Apple has completely abandoned the UNIX side of macOS but I found out recently they've been busy updating awk with almost every update since Catalina among other things...

 

[benwiggy]

I think the issue was that enscript/a2ps only generates PostScript but Apple has mostly deprecated PostScript in favor PDF.

They've done more than deprecate it. They've been waving enormous flags that you have to get off the train. They removed enscript in Catalina. And groff/troff in Monterey.

PostScript was the de facto API for printing under UNIX for a long time

CUPS changed its default job file format to PDF in 2012.

 

[jdw13]

You can still send PS directly to a printer.

Yes, you are correct, thanks for the clarification. Last year, I was having problems after OS update because a2ps was no longer sending output directly to printer correctly so I wrote a script to send a2ps output to a /tmp file and then print that file using a2ps-lpr-wrapper because I noticed it was there. In retrospect, the 'wrapper' may not have been necessary. Using lpr may have been alright.

I do not recall clearly, but the issue with a2ps may have been that a2ps was using a newly-deprecated OS library call when sending its PostScript output to the printer.

 

[bzgnyc2]

They've done more than deprecate it. They've been waving enormous flags that you have to get off the train. They removed enscript in Catalina. And groff/troff in Monterey.


CUPS changed its default job file format to PDF in 2012.

This thread has gotten me curious about what Apple is doing and became a little side research project. Not because I need the results but because it was interesting to get a clearer view of some Apple product decisions/investments especially around macOS (or MacOS X as I still prefer):

What I've found is:

• Apple is still advancing the UNIX side of macOS
• Apple hates GPLv3 -- they never incorporated any software licensed as such, they deferred updating the software that adopted it, and they've switched packages when they found alternatives
• Apple deprecates software less than you think (or at least I thought) but they also do so without much warning or explanation

I admit I haven't been keeping up with macOS releases because they do seem to drop things without much warning and I often don't have time for the distraction. As such, I don't have first-hand with Ventura and Sonoma nor did I jump on Big Sur. I only recently noticed a few things on my Monterey system that apparently happened in Big Sur.

However, they have been doing tweaking a lot o the UNIX stuff and this can be seen in their public source code that they snuck on Github a few years ago. If you look at their open source landing page (https://opensource.apple.com) you'd think it's all basically WebKit and Swift and a few more things listed under Projects.

But if you go their Releases page they nicely summarize and make avaialble every open source UNIX tool included in every release:

Apple Open Source

opensource.apple.com

Then it's easy to go to the linked GitHub page to see the original version of the source software for each case along with Apple's patches. What I found was pretty much everything GNU (Bash, GNU bc, GNU Diff, GNU ROFF, Gunzip, etc) came to a halt after the GPLv3 release (typically 2009-2011). In some cases Apple continued tweaking the last GPLv2 code years afterwards.

In other cases, they switched to alternatives when they could find them. For example "mandoc" to replace GNU ROFF. GROPDF wasn't included in GROFF until the GPLv3 (circa 2009) which Apple wouldn't touch so left us with no ability to directly create PDF versions of man pages. However, it looks like with Ventura they jetisoned "groff" for "mandoc" (which is special-purposesd for man pages rather than generic ROFF files), and in exchange we got the option for PDF output without going through PostScript.

The other thing I noticed is there is still a ton of what I'd consider niche UNIX software still included even in Sonoma. uuencode? Haven't used that in years. I don't recall "rs" from any other commercial system I used and surprised we're still carrying that around. It's been a long time since I've seen anyone use "finger". Ditto modem controls and postfix SMTP.

Then while I agree PDF has been the future since Apple went Quartz/PDF instead of DisplayPostScript, it wasn't clear PostScript support would be dropped until it was. Others who keep up with every release thought the same:

PostScript’s sudden death in Sonoma

For the last 39 years, PostScript has been at the heart of the Mac, bringing desktop publishing, fonts, and the LaserWriter and other printers. It has been removed from Sonoma.

eclecticlight.co

It's true CUPS switched to PDF along time ago but it wasn't clear to me that meant dropping Postscript support elsewhere in the system given that PostScript was the de facto API for printing under UNIX for decades and a foundational technology for Apple's graphic design base. Apple dropped Enscript after Lion (my guess based on the above is due to GPLv3 rather than dropping PostScript) but kept pstopdf and related PostScript rendering code around through Monterey. On the flip side, Apple didn't include generation of PDF versions of man pages until Ventura or Sonoma.

In the meantime, here are some commands to go direct to PDF on Sonoma (and possibly Ventura) for two types of that the UNIX-minded are likely to want:

mandoc -T pdf -O paper=letter $(man -w ls) | open -fa "Preview"
cupsfilter -o prettyprint -o landscape -i text/plain test.c | open -fa "Preview"

What would have been nice during these transitions is if Apple included notes about changes around this in release notes and then listed workaround such as the above (and ideally made things "just work" -- man -T pdf should do the same as the first item). Clearly from questions by different people here and on the internet, it wasn't clear to everyone what Apple was doing and the alternative options available to them. And no one would fault them if they enhanced VIM with the option to output PDF rather than just PS.

 

[CasualFanboy]

The founders of xRes, brothers Freddy and Richard Krueger (no joke), laughed all the way to the bank.

It's understandable why some do, this is just a personal value, but....

If I found myself in posession of a good company/product, I'd refuse to sell out to any of these global corporate entities, out of principle.

 

[bogdanw]

SecurityWeek: Attackers Exploiting Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Ghostscript
https://www.securityweek.com/attack...-code-execution-vulnerability-in-ghostscript/
"Security researchers are raising the alarm on a Ghostscript vulnerability leading to remote code execution that has already been exploited in the wild.
Tracked as CVE-2024-29510 and described as a format string injection in the uniprint device, the security defect could allow an attacker to bypass the -dSAFER sandbox and execute code remotely."

 

[bzgnyc2]

SecurityWeek: Attackers Exploiting Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Ghostscript
https://www.securityweek.com/attack...-code-execution-vulnerability-in-ghostscript/
"Security researchers are raising the alarm on a Ghostscript vulnerability leading to remote code execution that has already been exploited in the wild.
Tracked as CVE-2024-29510 and described as a format string injection in the uniprint device, the security defect could allow an attacker to bypass the -dSAFER sandbox and execute code remotely."

Thanks for sharing. I like PostScript and used it as a proxy for quality in the past. I appreciated Apple's builtin support for it in the beginning and still look past printers and such that don't support it. However, I appreciate it's probably impossible to secure and therefore one we need to let it go and disappear into the past.

There still remain a few PostScript-only tools in UNIX-land and we should be looking to replace them with ones that can go straight to PDF. Normal Aqua/Quartz applications have been fine since the beginning. I think specialized apps from companies like Adobe used to have special PostScript modes and not sure they are still doing that in any version compatible with Sonoma? Similarly as of Sonoma I believe all bundled UNIX software except VI/VIM is fine. Then it would be nice if Apple subsidized efforts to add PDF printing to VIM though I appreciate not everyone thinks that is Apple's responsibility...

 

[jasnw]

I am hoping there will always be a tool available to convert PS to PDF. I have a lot invested over 30 years in codes that output PS for making diagrams and scientific graphics for my own use. It was fun to learn, and I was able to leverage what I learned from Forth (another stack-based language) into something useful rather than just a fun toy to play with. Since the language isn't being developed any longer, the only changes a code like ghostscript needs to chase are security based, and since I'm using GS to convert only my own PS output I don't really care about that. So I can live with the final working version if they quit. One of the nice side effects of being an old command-line warrior.

 

[benwiggy]

I am hoping there will always be a tool available to convert PS to PDF.

GhostScript is still being developed, for sure. But "always" and computing don't really go together!