Preview won't open eps, ps

Does anything appear in Console when the files fail to open?

It's happening to me, too, and it appears that some people have had trouble with it for a year or more.

There's a unix app called ps2pdf which converts postscript to pdf, but who knows where I got it...

Do you have the same problem in mail?

Put an eps in an email and see if it crashes mail too. I am having this in mail and Preview - but the strange thing is, on the SAME computer under a different account there is no problem. So there has to be something in my home library folder causing the hang, but I have not found it yet. Tons of people having this problem with Mail. Just search for EPS Mail and you will see a slew of posts going back a year or more.

The solution of copying preview from another machine does not make sense - since it works on this machine, just not on this account on this machine.

I spent about 4 hours on this. Here is what I found.

1) This EPS opening issue if it existz causes problems in Preview, Mail, and even ColorSync when trying to open EPS file.

2) The same machine can have problems in one user account, but be fine in another.

3) Creating a new account usually creates an account that will open EPS files fine. (see strange notes below)

4) Even when you copy all the contents of the old home folder were the EPS files were not working into the the new home folder, eps files will still open fine. (You can do this by copying the old home folder to the root fo the drive. Log off. Go to the new account and change the permissions on all the files to map to the new account as owner. Delete the content of the current home folder. Copy these into the new home folder. Log off and back on.)

BUT HERE IS WHERE IT GETS VERY VERY VERY STRANGE. I copied by entire problematic home folder to a BACKUP drive. Then I logged off and logged in as a different admin. I deleted the problematic account - erasing the entire contents of the account. Then I restarted. If I created an account with a NEW name and short name, then EPS files worked. BUT IF I CREATED A CLEAN BRAND NEW ACCOUNT WITH THE SAME NAME AS THE ACCOUNT THAT DID NOT WORK BEFORE - IT WOULD NOT WORK AGAIN. This is a brand new clean account, that just happens to have the same name as the account that did not work before. Again, the home folder is CLEAN. But when I tried to open EPS on this account, they would hang. I could create another account with different name, and EPS would open fine.

So this makes no sense to me. Something in the OS is different based on account OUTSIDE of the home folder.

So anyway, if you are having this problem here is the SOLUTION:
1) Create a new user account with a different name and short name.
2) Copy the contents of your current home folder to this new account. (following the steps above.)
3) Use the new account.

This seems crazy, but it seems to work. Let me know if you have this issue too.

MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Very interesting indeed.

I'd tried the following hint...

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2006/12/manpages/index.php


pman()
{
man -t “${1}” | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app/
}

...which allowed me to open man pages into Preview as nicely formatted PDF.

The actual output of the man -t command is postscript, which then gets piped through to the open command resulting in Preview doing a PS to PDF conversion.

It worked flawlessly for a few weeks (I first tried it on Dec 1, 2006), then suddenly I started getting the error stating “File Error Could Not open file” after the conversion had apparently finished.

Out of curiosity, I tried running the following to create myself a temp post script file to try things with…

% man -t man > temp.ps

This resulted in the temp.ps file, which I then tried opening in Preview, only to get a “File Error Could Not open file” error dialog. This occurs AFTER a progress dialog showing preview attempting to convert the .ps to .pdf

What makes it real strange, is that if I open the file in Firefox, which uses the PDF Browser Plugin for PDF display rather than the Preview application, it works. I see the formatted PDF in the browser window.

I have a workable solution again now by using a command line as such, which I've now added as an alias in my ~/.profile

man -t man > ~/tmp/temp.ps; open -a /Applications/Internet\ Tools/Browsers/Firefox.app ~/tmp/temp.ps

Still, I cannot grasp just why Preview suddenly stopped being able to do what it had been doing just fine. I'm hoping in my case, simply replacing the application will solve the issue, as I don't look forward to trying to track down a user account specific issue if it involves creating a new user, and migrating all my data over. Ugh.


G4 800 (Quicksilver) / Powerbook 1.5 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)