PDF on Macs: the rise and fall of Preview

The Mac established itself on the strength of two graphics languages, QuickDraw and PostScript. QuickDraw was for its display, had many advanced features for the time, and you may still bump into it in PICT graphics files. PostScript, developed in the early 1980s by the founders of Adobe including the late John Warnock and Charles Geschke, was for high-end printers, particularly Apple’s LaserWriter that enabled the Mac to lead the ‘desktop publishing revolution’.

Neither QuickDraw nor PostScript were intended for use in general-purpose document formats. In 1993, Adobe introduced its Portable Document Format, PDF, as one of several contenders for a universal format for electronic distribution of documents with arbitrary content. To create a PDF document in those days, you first had to print to a PostScript file, then use Adobe’s Distiller app to convert that into PDF, a purpose-designed subset and derivative of PostScript.

With Macs sticking to their proprietary QuickDraw, when the NeXT computer was developed, its designers opted for Display PostScript as the centrepiece of its graphics. At the time, many thought this to be a mistake, as PostScript isn’t as efficient a graphics language as QuickDraw, as it had been designed to render pages in slower time in print engines.

When NeXT and Mac merged to form the beginnings of Mac OS X, Display PostScript was replaced with PDF as the central graphics standard for both display and printing, in what was dubbed Quartz 2D, which lives on today in macOS. At the time, the PDF engine in Quartz was one of few, alongside Adobe’s. Little is known of its origins, although it could conceivably have been derived from NeXTSTEP’s PostScript engine. Apple first demonstrated Quartz at WWDC in 1999.

Prior to Mac OS X, Adobe Acrobat, both in its free viewer form and a paid-for Pro version, were the de facto standard for reading, printing and working with PDF documents on the Mac. The Preview app had originated in NeXTSTEP in 1989 as its image and PDF viewer, and was brought across to early versions of Mac OS X, where it has remained ever since.

By Mac OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003, Apple was claiming that Preview was “the fastest PDF viewer on the planet”, capable of navigating and searching text within PDF documents “at lightning speed”. This worked with the Mac’s new built-in support for faxing, which rendered received faxes in PDF to make them easier and clearer to access.

At that time, Preview was also able to convert Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files and raw PostScript to PDF, so they could be saved in the more accessible format, and printed easily.

Since those heady days, Preview has been relatively neglected. Revision of both the Quartz PDF engine and its API brought a spate of bugs that only abated with macOS Sierra. Preview has adopted an uncommon model for PDF annotations that doesn’t work well with other PDF products. Then, in macOS Ventura, Apple removed all support for EPS and PostScript conversion, most probably as a result of ongoing security concerns, and their progressive disuse.

Preview’s fall from grace has been a slow descent, but I seriously doubt whether its PDF capabilities will ever be listed among the major features of any future version of macOS. Maybe macOS 15 will surprise us?