QuickLook for PostScript files

With macOS 12 Monterey, Apple removed the QuickLook preview functionality for (Encapsulated) PostScript files. With a little editing this can be reenabled.

Note: the hint described here works only with macOS 12 Monterey and macOS 13 Ventura. With macOS 14 Sonoma Apple eventually removed all PostScript-related frameworks.

Open Terminal.app and do

cp -ipR /System/Library/QuickLook/Illustrator.qlgenerator ~/Library/QuickLook/

Edit ~/Library/QuickLook/Illustrator.qlgenerator/Contents/Info.plist and add the lines

<string>com.adobe.postscript</string>
<string>com.adobe.encapsulated-postscript</string>

above the line <string>com.adobe.illustrator.ai-image</string>

In my case, the start of the Info.plist files then reads

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>BuildMachineOSBuild</key>
        <string>22A380017</string>
        <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
        <string>English</string>
        <key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
        <array>
                <dict>
                        <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
                        <string>QLGenerator</string>
                        <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
                        <array>
                                <string>com.adobe.postscript</string>
                                <string>com.adobe.encapsulated-postscript</string>
                                <string>com.adobe.illustrator.ai-image</string>
                        </array>
                </dict>
        </array>

After logging out and logging in again, QuickLook preview of PostScript files should work again.

Note that starting with macOS 13 Ventura removed the support of Preview.app for PostScript files. However, the underyling PSNormalizer.framework is still present and used by apps like Skim.app (available through Managed Software Centre) to display PS and EPS data.

Note #2: Printing of PostScript files is still possible by dragging them into the respective printer queue window.

Note #3: According to Apple’s release notes, starting with version 14 Sonoma macOS has removed the functionality for converting PostScript and EPS files to PDF format. As a result, CoreGraphics’ CGPSConverter returns an error when invoked, ImageIO no longer converts EPS files, NSEPSImageRep does not display EPS files, and PMPrinterPrintWithFile does not accept a PostScript file for non-PostScript print queues.

Note #4: In my eyes, the reason for this step-by-step removal of PS and EPS support relates to security problems, see for example an old blog post by Micro$oft from 2017.