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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.




> Mac OS' Preview.app "natively" supports PostScript but will stubbornly convert it to a PDF and delete the original PS file

A "preVIEW" app that DELETES a file is an abomination that only Apple could ever get away with.


> ...tools like pdftk have been able to losslessly compress them...

I have had good luck with pdfsizeopt.

https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt




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