macOS Ventura: finder's file preview less powerful?

However, this app seems to work as a quicklook previewer for a wide variety of file types, including TeX and CSS. (Thanks to this answer on this related TeX.SE thread.)

hildebrands5 wrote:

ok here you go with a larger file -- same issue.

It's not the same issue. If you want to have a substantive discussion about issues, you have to start with valid data.

I'm sorry, but you just have to - no options.

I'm not convinced that it's about that. If I change the ending to *.text instead of *.tex, it recognise the "correct" programme to generate the QuickLook.

OK. Working as designed, or as hacked, as the case may be.

What I mean with the Tips app is that QuickLook seems to try to open *.tex files with it, as you can see on the screenshot.

QuickLook does offer a button to open the document using whatever app the system selects, of you have chosen, as the default app for this type of file, or this particular file. This app is also what is providing the preview. If that preview is wrong, then you have to contact the developer of said app and ask them to fix it. The operating system has absolutely nothing to do with it in this case.

If this were the case of a JPEG file, or maybe an EPS file, something that the operating system was handling, then it would be a question for the operating system. But macOS never handled tex files so there was never anything for it to do. It is your responsibility to download, and maintain through upgrades or new downloads, a tool that can open, and hopefully preview, your particular files. If texstudio can't handle it anymore, then you'll have to find something else.

Unfortunately, given the "free software" nature of tex, I predict that you will have a difficult time finding something that will work. That's just the nature of the modern world. Everybody wants to make a living, except open source developers. They just make a point to avoid supporting their free software on Macs. Maybe they could set you up with a nice Ubuntu system or something. I would be happy to write a tex preview for you, but I doubt you would be willing to pay what I would have to charge for the effort.

etresoft wrote:

That's what's so confusing. You, and everybody else in this thread, wants exactly what Ventura does and every version of macOS has always done.

Except Ventura does not do it, which is what everyone has been trying to tell you, but you keep telling people they are wrong, and being aggressive in your replies. I cannot directly prove that it used to work before Ventura, since I only have a Ventura machine, but I can show you an example of the behaviour we were used to and how this has changed since Ventura.

This is an example of how it worked before Ventura (since my machine has Ventura installed I achieved this by temporarily changing the extension of the file from .tex to .txt, but this is the way it used to work with .tex files before Ventura):

and this is the behaviour we are now seeing in Ventura:

So you are right that it used to work in previous version of macOS, but it clearly does not work anymore in Ventura.

Your example shows a file with a size of 0KB which may be the problem. I've never used .tex files before so I'm not sure how macOS handles those files normally. In order for the Quicklook feature to work, then the file type must be something macOS recognizes. Even with a recognized file type, sometimes the file configuration will be in an unrecognized format (perhaps utilizing newer features that macOS is unable to handle natively).

I'm not sure whether Quicklook is able to utilize any third party apps when performing the document preview, but if it does, then perhaps that third party software is not fully compatible with Ventura.

hildebrands5 wrote:

I don't understand what you mean. It obviously does NOT work on my machine. Before the update, I saw the raw text that is contained in a *.tex file, now I see this weird Tips app stuff. At the same time, it works on other peoples' machines. So, what do you mean by "every screenshot in this thread shows it working properly"? The same is true for *.md files.

Oh boy! You're in trouble now! I'm not on the iPad anymore and I can more easily take screenshots and mark them up.

Same with BBEdit...

There simply isn't anything to display in a 12 or 14 byte file. What's it supposed to show? Here is the smallest possible HTML file:

<html></html>

That's 13 bytes. One of your files was smaller than this. A preview of nothing is, in fact, nothing.

I don't know what you mean about "weird Tips app stuff". You're going to have to explain that in more detail.

At the same time, it works on other peoples' machines.

OK. What does that mean? Can you take a screenshot of the same file showing one kind of preview on someone else's machine and an invalid preview on your machine? So far, all you've shown are perfectly valid previews of virtually empty files.

Also, no idea how your opinion about markdown matters for this. If you have something productive to say, I'd highly appreciate it.

That was a reply to jvarilly. It is common for people in these forums to add "me too" replies. In most cases, their "me too" replies have nothing to do with the OP's (your) problem. We just have to try to politely tell these people to go away and ask their own question. (They usually don't appreciate that suggestion.)

In jvarilly's defence, that was an on-topic "me too" reply. While it was "on-topic", it wasn't actually valid or helpful. jvarilly's comment about Markdown suggests that they were possibly a developer. Being a developer myself, I would really appreciate having a Markdown QuickLook preview app. But I don't want it enough to bother writing it myself. And more importantly, there's absolutely no money in writing QuickLook previews so I'm not going to write it for anyone else either.

When macOS Monterey was introduced, Apple removed the QuickLook previews for EPS files. I did write a quick-n-dirty app to restore those previews and gave that app away for free. (Alas, the rules of the forum forbid me from posting a link to it.) In Ventura, Apple removed all ability for Preview to open Postscript or EPS files entirely. Again, I wrote a quick-n-dirty app to open and preview these files. But Postscript is a much more difficult format and that's a can-o-worms I didn't want to bother dealing with in a free app. And as before, there is absolutely zero money to be made in the opening-40-year-old-file-format market. So now that little app is just for me only.

Is that productive? Who's to judge? I don't have any tex files and I'm not going to make any. Back in grad school, all the hip students and professors used LaTex for their papers. I was never hip. I used equation editor in Word. As you might expect, that, too, was not appreciated. How dare I just type in the equations without learning a new typesetting language. The Horror!

I am seeing the same behaviour. (See also here.)

I think there is some confusion in this thread about preview vs quicklook.

Preview is working fine for TeX/LaTeX files -- it is quicklook that has stopped working correctly. Indeed, pressing the spacebar on a *.tex file show the correct preview icon but the message

The extension com.apple.tips.TipsAppQuicklook-macOS does not implement file previews

Most of my other text file types (*.c, *.py, *.text, etc) seem to work fine, and give an appropriate "Open in some app" button, but *.tex fails as for the OP (my upper right button says "Open with Textmate". (See also this thread which sees similar behaviour for css.)

(Even if this is due to deprecated ql generators, it's still weird that it tries to default to the "tips" app!)

I think that this used to be handled by TextMate (with syntax highlighting!), but I am not sure. But I have plenty of other TeX-capable editors, so I am surprised by this behaviour. And TextMate does still work as the quicklook generator in at least some cases.

Any more nuanced ideas? (E.g., I have a lot of *.tex-capable editors on my system, some of which do supply QL generators. Is there any way to force one of them to take over?)

I don't see any claims that it renders TeX files. It just displays the code

Aha.

We have obviously been talking completely passed one another. I never wanted rendered TeX — I just wanted quicklook of the source! Prior to Ventura, this was successfully handled by some application, perhaps TextMate. In Ventura (on my machine at least) the "icon preview" for *.tex files still correctly showed a snippet of the source, but the "quicklook window" preview -- which used to show the source -- subsequently just showed the dialog at the top, including the (at best misleading, but possibly buggy and broken) "tipsAppQuicklook" message.

But this app seems to provide exactly that source code preview (it's actually overkill -- I was very happy with whatever quicklook provider was successfully giving previews of most of my C, python, Julia, etc, source files prior to and since Ventura). Of course, this works just fine for empty and 14-byte files, since they are proper, if boring, source code.

This is what I wanted, and what I am nearly certain the other participants on this thread wanted as well.

I downloaded an example TeX file and it was set to be handled by BBEdit. It showed a preview, icon preview, and QuickLook of the markup text. It did not interpret the markup.

Have you installed and run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps on your Mac?

Barney-15E wrote:

I don't believe I have ever had TextMate, and I get that error on .css files.

If my theory about how that happens is valid, then it could happen with literally any app that creates a new UTI based on "public.text". I didn't see it until I tried to reproduce this problem.

Quicklook, or really any kind of system plugin that screws around with file types, can get the system confused. Developers shouldn't even attempt it unless they are testing in a VM. Otherwise, once the system gets confused, the hapless developer might finally figure it out, but then not notice that they've got it right because the system is all scrambled.

I'm still safe because I tested this on my Ventura test machine. Being a Mac developer, I'm not going to switch my production system to Ventura until March or April at earliest.

One reason why many of suspect that there is a bug lurking somewhere are the pointers to

com.apple.tips.TipsAppQuicklook-macOS

in the quicklook message dialog for a variety of file types (css as well as tex). It's certainly possible that plugin architecture has changed in Ventura (i.e., previously deprecated features have been removed) and so things that used to work should no longer do so. However, this message appears to be sufficiently cryptic and misleading that it implicates a bug somewhere.

[Edited by Moderator]

So, I don’t think the “Open with BBEdit” button means that BBEdit is actually the provider of the appropriate quicklook extension — the BBEdit developers have explicitly told me that they don’t provide one!

And, for what it’s worth, I’ve had BBEdit installed the whole time I was having the “TipsAppQuicklook” problem with *.tex files.

As mentioned above, the app at https://github.com/sbarex/SourceCodeSyntaxHighlight seems to fix it for me by explicitly providing quicklook for many types of text source files (perhaps too many!)… Also, after installing it and then uninstalling it as a test, the “TipsAppQuicklook” message seems to go away for some — but not all! — file types, but still without actually showing the preview window.

Curiouser etc.

Latex is source code, compilation is not particularly fast, and in fact latex projects can have multiple files. I would not expect (nor want) quicklook to render them as a compiled document any more than I would want quicklook to render C source code as a compiled application. The old behaviour was exactly what I (and most or all other latex users) wanted, since I would be previewing them in advance of editing them.

I am nearly certain that the system successfully did source code highlighting using whatever apps I had on my system that were able to provide that quicklook service (probably TextMate, as I’ve said), but I am absolutely 100% certain that it did successfully render them as text. TextMate was not a “buggy implementation” of the old version of quicklook, but indeed it is not being as actively maintained now and its developers (now open-source) have not implemented this, unfortunately. Until three or so months ago, it worked fine.

Yes, there is certainly a bug somewhere in the current complicated chain of macOS, some applications, and their plists which are causing some kinds of source files to not correctly render as text in quicklook under some circumstances. This may or may not be due to TextMate or another third party app like TeXShop — perhaps not entirely, because the fact that it is sometimes attempting to resolve to Apple’s “Tips” app seems suspicious.

So, please, there is no need for what I can only interpret as an angry and snarky attitude to all of us calmly trying to explain our point — even if you disagree.

jvarilly wrote:

The discussion on this thread seems to be missing the point. A *.tex file is just an ordinary text file (plain ASCII, as we used to say),

and it can be read with any text editor or code editor: BBEdit, TextMate, Alpha, even TextEdit, as well as typesetting programs like TeXStudio to TeXShop. The problem is that Ventura no longer assigns text-file status to the *.tex extension, so QuickLook gets confused.

There is no problem. Ventura works the same was as all previous versions. Every screenshot in this thread shows it working properly.

Even more alarming is that Markdown files, with an *.md extension, cannot be read by QuickLook either. This is clearly an operating system problem

Markdown is a junk file format for developers who can’t do basic HTML. I have yet to see a single tool that can display it. The state of the art is to convert it to HTML and then display the HTML in a web browser.

If you want a decent Markdown preview, all you need to do is write one. The fame and fortune of the QuickLook developer is just sitting there waiting for you to seize it. Carpe QuickLook!