PostView - an Image, PDF and PostScript Viewer for Mac OS X

I must admit to being a bit schizophrenic about certain things. For instance, I love the Safari web browser, Mail.app, and iChat. But do I use them? Not all the time. Instead I often find myself using Camino for web browsing, Thunderbird for email, and Adium for chatting. Apple's applications are certainly good, but I just like other free options better.

Perhaps because of this, I find myself in a constant search for other, better software than what I currently use. Doesn't really matter what it is. I could be using the word processor with the most features, easiest interface and best compatibility, but I'd probably still try out whatever "new" program came along. That's just how I am.

But it's not always that I feel the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Sometimes I really do go looking for something that will improve my computing life. For Linux, it's often been a search for an image viewer that would view whatever I threw at it. It seems like most image viewers can view JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF and other common graphic formats, but not always formats such as PDF or PS (PostScript).

Frankly, I still haven't found what I'm looking for in Linux, so I still have the default image viewer installed, along with Adobe Reader for my PDF viewing needs.

For Mac OSX, on the other hand, I may have found a program to do just what I want. The name of the program is PostView, and on the surface it's fairly similar to Apple's included Preview application. PostView can open GIF, JPG, JPG 2000, BMP, OpenEXR, PDF, PSD (Photoshop), PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA and TIFF, along with PostScript , and probably many more formats. Regardless, it was able to open everything I threw at it, including images with transparency, as well as Photoshop documents with layers. So I think it's safe to say that PostView offers the same amount of functionality as does Apple's Preview application.

So if they both can read the same types of documents, why should one prefer PostView over Preview? In my mind, it comes down to PostScript documents. Either you view a lot of them, or you don't. If you don't, you likely have no real use for PostView, but if you do, it could save you a lot of time.

Why? Because when you do attempt to read a PostScript document in Preview, you'll notice that it doesn't pop up nearly as quickly as does any other document. In fact, you'll notice a small progress screen, informing you that Preview is now converting your PostScript document to PDF. Now, this is a huge waste, especially if you only want to look at the PostScript document, because you're forced to wait around while Preview converts you image (in memory), to a different format, simply to allow you to see it.

PostView has no such limitation. Simply drag your PostScript file to PostView's icon, or right-click and choose PostView from the menu (or open the document from within a running copy of PostView), and within seconds you're viewing your PostScript document. And the time savings gets even better when you're finished viewing the document. This is because Preview, as it has converted your document to a different format, asks you - even if you made no changes - if you want to save the changes. It doesn't acknowledge that your document is untouched, because in Preview's mind, you did convert it - from PostScript to PDF.

Again, this isn't an issue with PostView, since PostView can open PostScript images natively, without an extra step needed for converting.

And really, that's about it. PostView offers a drawer so that you can quickly jump to any page you want in a multipage document (such as a PDF0, although it does suffer a bit compared to Preview. While Preview shows a preview of each page, PostView only shows the page numbers in a list. Not a huge deal, but not quite as handy, either.

Still, PostView, for those who need a good PostScript viewer, is really a fantastic choice. It's shareware (not free), but a license is only $22.00, which in my mind is pretty good. I wouldn't recommend PostView if you only plan to use it for formats already supported by Preview, but if you do use a lot of PostScript files, then it's practically perfect. You can download a trial copy of PostView from its home page, but be warned, anything you view or save (check out the screen shots), will have a large watermark.