EXPERT ADVICE
Our resident genius Howard Oakley solves your Mac and iOS problems
RIP PostScript
POSTSCRIPT, THE PAGE description language that made desktop publishing and the Mac so popular in the 1980s, is now officially unsupported in macOS Sonoma. You can still print to PostScript printers and send PostScript files direct to them, but Preview can no longer image or convert them. You’ll find that the command tool pstopdf has vanished, and the same goes for Encapsulated PostScript, EPS.
While the language is ideal for printing and pre–press, it’s a gift to those who develop malicious software. Over the last year, severe vulnerabilities have been found in its interpreters, sufficient to make them a liability we could all do without.
This is all the more poignant as John Warnock, co–founder of Adobe and architect of PostScript and PDF, died last August. Rest in peace, Dr Warnock and PostScript.