Dear community,
is it true that the recent update has decreased coverage of finder's file preview function (hit space bar in finder on any file)? For instance, I noticed this behaviour for ".tex" files - see attached screenshot.
This would really be a shame since this was an amazing feature. Any ideas?
Best,
Seb
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.0
a.jaffe wrote:
I am seeing the same behaviour. (See also here.)
I think there is some confusion in this thread about preview vs quicklook.
Preview and QuickLook are the same thing. I can understand how people who haven't dealt with these technologies might be confused. It is extremely confusing.
There are two parts to QuickLook: icon thumbnails and previews
What you (and the Finder) call a "preview" (Finder > View > Show Preview) is actually the icon thumbnail.
What you (and the Finder) call a "quicklook" (Finder > {select file} > {press spacebar}) is the preview
This difference is important because, internally, a quicklook plugin can choose to implement only one of these features. For example, in my own app, I implement the preview to show an EtreCheck report in a Window. But the report is just a wall of text. I don't implement the thumbnail icon. In this specific example, only the full-size preview has any meaning. A TeX file is very similar in concept. I expect anyone who has written a QuickLook plugin for a TeX file would make a similar decision. You just can't represent a 12 page paper full of math equations in a single icon. But you can do it in a scrolling preview.
But wait, we aren't done yet. It is even more complicated.
As of macOS 10.13, Apple started rolling out a new Quicklook architecture. As I discovered just the other day, Apple didn't actually finish this rollout until Ventura. For each of those types of previews, there are two ways of implementing them - a complicated way and an easier, but perhaps more complicated, way. This is true of both the old and new versions. In the "new and improved" version, only the view-based, "complicated" way is supported. The easy method is not supported until macOS 12. Alas, that method doesn't actually work properly until Ventura.
So that is potentially 8 different ways of drawing a preview, in potentially 5 different contexts (which I didn't mention), all behaving differently over 8 different operating systems. Confused yet?
PS: I'm not sure how much the old "qlmanage" tool even works anymore. The new method is, of course, more complicated. Use the following command to dump all quicklook information:
pluginkit -mvvvv -p com.apple.quicklook.preview --raw
Use this command to see information about a specific UTI - not, not that UTI, I mean the problematic one - a Uniform Type Identifier. (It would sure be nice if some antibiotics and cranberry juice could clear up this mess.)
pluginkit -mvvvv -p com.apple.quicklook.preview -i com.etresoft.EPSView.EPSViewQuickLook --raw
Note that the -i <identifier> flag identifies the bundle identifier of the quicklook plugin inside an app's bundle. This example is using my EPSView tool that I wrote when Monterey removed quicklook previews from EPS files. (Ventura removed support for all EPS and Postscript files in Preview (the app) but not the lower-level APIs. Did I mention that this stuff was confusing?) This command is useful to identifying what an individual plugin is doing. I don't know any method for identifying which plugin should be used, or could be used, other than manually searching the output of the previous command.
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
I think that message is a side effect of the TextMate app. My explanation above on the details of how all this works is woefully incomplete. I didn't mention how individual apps can import and export UTI->extension->MIME type mappings. I'm guessing that TextMate exported a UTI that matched the TeX files and made it a child of the "public.text" UTI (which is appropriate). However, since TextMate didn't have the appropriate plugins, the operating system is now a bit confused.
Any more nuanced ideas?
You want me to get more nuanced? Sorry, but here is a 5000 character limit on replies in the Apple Support Community and I'm already over 4000.
You just need apps that have better support for TeX files. That file format was ancient when I was in grad school back in the 1990s. The output from those tools is horribly ugly. I tried to replicate what you are seeing. I actually couldn't get any quicklook or preview to work, but I did reproduce that strange "tips" message. You must have more TeX apps than I could find. Texstudio is ancient and isn't even signed. It doesn't even work without another 5 GB (!) download of MacTex. I was prescient enough to save my /usr/local directory before MacTex trashed it.
I will agree that Apple has made this unbelievably difficult. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've really skimmed the issue here. You will need to contact the developer(s) of your favourite LaTeX tools and ask them to write a new-style QuickLook preview for their apps.
For what it's worth, I also have BBedit installed, and I get the same
com.apple.tips.TipsAppQuicklook-macOS does not implement file previews
message for *.css files, an "Open with BBedit" button, and a generic TEXT-labelled BBedit icon (with no thumbnail preview).
I came to this discussion trying to find an answer/solution to the lack of quick view for .tex files which I used on a daily basis before upgrading to Ventura. And I have to say I am genuinely confused as to why you're taking part in this discussion. You've not really provided anything I would consider to be helpful (this is based on my own opinion and lack of technical understanding to your longer replies, so I might be completely wrong), and you've made clear your disdain for TeX in general (even though a vast portion of the scientific community would strongly disagree with you):
That file format was ancient when I was in grad school back in the 1990s. The output from those tools is horribly ugly.
so I'm not sure what your gaining from being here.
But all that is besides the point, I just wanted to point out something you said I believe to be wrong:
here 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.
A preview/quickview of a file with nothing is not, in fact, nothing, it is a file with nothing in it. See for example this completely empty file (0 bytes, so even shorter than a sentence!):
and when I press the space bar I get the following quickview
Also, as others have pointed out a .tex file is just a plain ASCII file, which before Ventura had a working quickview like any other text file. So when you say this:
There is no problem. Ventura works the same was as all previous versions. Every screenshot in this thread shows it working properly.
especially given your lack of knowledge of how TeX files behaved in previous versions of macOS, you're 100% wrong.
a.jaffe wrote:
I never wanted rendered TeX — I just wanted quicklook of the source!
You wanted...what it always did?
Prior to Ventura, this was successfully handled by some application, perhaps TextMate.
Anno Ventura too.
This is what I wanted, and what I am nearly certain the other participants on this thread wanted as well.
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.
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 the related TeX.SE thread.)
This is what the info says, all fine with regards to the program that would open it. Also the top right corner of the messed up quick view wants to use texstudio. Do you have any idea what this Tips app could be? I don't have this app installed and cannot find it anywhere.
I assumed it was the Tips that appear shortly after an upgrade, but am not certain. I think it’s just a web page, though.
I don’t know if reinstalling that app would trigger it loading the QuickLook preview generator.
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.
Also, no idea how your opinion about markdown matters for this. If you have something productive to say, I'd highly appreciate it.
The extension com.apple.tips.TipsAppQuicklook-macOS does not implement file previews
I think that message is a side effect of the TextMate app.
I don't believe I have ever had TextMate, and I get that error on .css files. I don't get the error for .tex files, but BBEdit handles those. I also have BBEdit set to open css files, but it doesn't generate the quicklook for those.
I have downloaded and tried many text editors, so it is entirely possible I installed and deleted TextMate, but all the others are still on my Mac. I tried setting several of them to default open css, but none added any quicklook capability.
It's hard to say. It is certainly a complicated system. It is actually harder to test than to implement. And yet, it really isn't worth the effort. No one ever comments on or appreciates the fact that certain developers add these kinds of functionality. If it breaks, nobody mentions it. It is always the same thing, everybody blaming Apple for removing some feature that they publicly deprecated 9 years ago. How many of those people ever contact the developer? Judging from this thread, and my own personal experience, not a one.
I don't know what's going on with the 13.1 beta. It is against the Apple Support Community Terms of Use to discuss beta products. Maybe 13.1 "fixes" the problem by breaking it again, and showing the fallback document icon. Or maybe it is modified to show the fallback document icon for files less than 20 bytes or something.
I just don't get this obsession to always have the latest version. Monterey has been working great for me since I installed it a few months ago. My Ventura testing is going well too. It is an obsession, isn't it? Same cycle every year. Everyone has to have the latest drug. Then they howl when something goes wrong, always hoping that the next update will provide the needed fix. Sounds like addiction to me. It even uses the same terminology, i.e. "a fix".
a.jaffe wrote:
Not fixed in 13.1, alas. Any other updates?
Of course not. It wasn't ever broken.
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 the related TeX.SE thread.)
Did you test that app? I don't see any claims that it renders TeX files. It just displays the code, albeit with a bit more colour than TextEdit does. How well does it handle 14 byte and zero byte files. That's the real test.
a.jaffe wrote:
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.
That's why QuickLook displays the binary code for image files and the raw data stream from PDF files. It's QuickSource, not QuickLook.
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.
Let's review ancient history of a few hours ago. You are the one who keeps mentioning TextMate. One of the few times you didn't was when you said, "So I deleted TeXShop". To this I responded, "Deleting buggy 3rd party apps often fixes these problems." TeXShop. Not TextMate. Two different apps. Different spelling and everything.
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.
There is no disagreement because there are no opinions. I've definitively, objectively established the cause of this problem - ancient, incompatible, buggy, poorly made TeX software. And to top it all off, it never actually did anything. No one ever had a functional QuickLook. It was always just source - generated by the operating system. It never, ever worked at all. But the code that was never used was written so poorly that it corrupted the normal behaviour of the system.
What a waste!
0KB isn't the problem, I tried with other files before. It works on macOS 12.
I think your last comment is correct as established by Barney-15E, thanks!
Sorry, follow-up. I downloaded BBEdit as well to see whether it works -- it doesn't. Can you explain what you mean by "did not interpret the markup"? I see this for an example tex file.
Any chance of that?
You’d have to ask Apple.
I haven’t tried .md, but as noted, .tex files QuickLook fine on my Mac.
I'm snot sure what the problem is here but FWIW here's a text file I just created and what it looks like in Ventura as an icon and in Quickview:
macOS Ventura: finder's file preview less powerful?
