Apple’s Adobe PostScript support ends in Sonoma
PostScript, the venerable page description language that originated on Mac computers in the ’80s, has finally reached the end of its road in macOS Sonoma.
Advertisement
Apple made the removal clear in its Sonoma release notes, stating that “macOS has removed the feature to convert PostScript and EPS files to PDF.”
“As a result, CGPSConverter CoreGraphics returns an error when called, ImageIO no longer converts EPS files, NSEPSImageRep does not render EPS files, and PMPrinterPrintWithFile does not accept PostScript files for non-PostScript print queues,” he elaborates.
It’s a bit of a sad footnote for a once-revolutionary technology that helped usher in the desktop publishing revolution in which Apple and Adobe were central players. But times have changed: PostScript inventor Charles Geschke died in 2021 at the age of 81.
For the most part, Adobe’s native PDF document format has replaced PostScript, so this issue is unlikely to affect most people other than those who have archives of PostScript or EPS files.
Advertisement
PostScript’s demise on the Mac shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who’s been paying attention. The writing was on the wall for years as Apple phased out PostScript support in subsequent macOS releases.
This process began with the release of Catalina in 2019, when Apple dropped support for PostScript Type 1 fonts in favor of OpenType. Adobe itself has followed suit by removing support for Type 1 fonts in Photoshop in 2021.
Removal accelerated with the release of macOS Monterey 12.3 when Apple introduced the ability to view PostScript files online. And in macOS Ventura, the Preview app removed support for PostScript conversion.
Removing PostScript from a Mac is good security, says Mac developer Dr. Howard Oakley. According to him, security researchers have discovered several serious vulnerabilities in common PostScript interpreters.
“PostScript is an old stack-based interpreted language developed at a time when code security was not yet conceived and malware was almost non-existent,” Oakley wrote in a recent blog post. “Among its attractive features is the fact that any PostScript object can be treated as data or executed as part of a program, and it can itself generate new objects, which in turn can be executed.
“Recently, security researchers have drawn attention to the fact that this is a gift for anyone who wants to write and distribute malicious code,” Oakley added. “Because it is effectively an image format, introducing malware into a PostScript file could allow it to run without user interaction, as is the case with some other graphics formats.”
Oakley noted that those who need to access PS and EPS files on their Mac still have several options, including the commercial Adobe Distiller app, Ghostscript from Artifex, or a virtual machine (VM) running macOS Monterey.