macOS Ventura: finder's file preview less powerful?

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.