Printing from Crossover

[Rover110]

Somehow a mac at work upgraded itself to Sonoma without being asked.

Since then I have found myself unable to print to a postscript printer from Windows executables that I run in Crossover 23.5
It seems that the print job is forever spooling.

When I print-to-file, I get a postscript file. But I think there is something wrong with the postscript that is produced.

Ventura, I could use ps2pdf to convert it to a pdf. But ps2pdf is not in Sonoma.

I tried using homebrew to install ps2pdf but I guess there's a setting messed up somewhere because the resulting pdf file is not usable. (The headings are fine, but some fonts come out huge - I guess 256x correct size.
And moving the .ps file to a mac that is still running Ventura doesn't help. Preview doesn't like the file, and ps2pdf on the Ventura mac gives the same unusable output.

How easy is it to downgrade to Ventura? I have seen various sets of instructions, and the one I currently plan to try says to put the installer onto a USB stick. Or is a Time Machine rewind better?

 

[Edgecrusherr]

Hey there, as you may know by now, Apple fully removed support for PostScript from Sonoma (I was doing some research on the details of this, and if it affects printing to PS printers when I saw your post). You can read about it here: https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...st-nail-in-the-coffin-for-postscript-on-macos.

As far as "downgrading", there's really no way to do that directly, and Time Machine does not support that directly either, so your options are basically:
1) Backup your boot drive, do a clean install, then manually setup everything up again, install apps, and copy your files back. [safest way, but more work]
2) If you had Time Machine running before you upgraded to Sonoma, you can choose to restore from an older backup. This doesn't always work, though. I like to say "Time Machine is so simple, it's stupid", so just be warned going in.
3) A possible 3rd is sometimes you can restore from an APFS snapshot, but you'd have to have the pre-sonoma snapshot still on the drive, I haven't done that in a long time, so I'm not sure if it'll work correctly in this situation.

Alternatively, you could use Parallels, UTM, or VMWare to virtualize an older version of macOS or other OS to work with PS files.

 

[Rover110]

That machine is back on Ventura.
For some reason, command-R MacOS recovery didn't want to do a restore to a previous backup with Ventura (with hindsight it might have been that it wanted me to erase my hard drive first).
So I did a network reinstall then migration-assistant to my last Ventura backup, and then cherry-picked any files I knew were newer than that.

One thing I don't understand is why the Mac decided to upgrade itself to Sonoma. I'm the only one who knows the admin password and I don't remember asking for it. I've now turned off "Install MacOS Updates"

 

[Edgecrusherr]

That machine is back on Ventura.
For some reason, command-R MacOS recovery didn't want to do a restore to a previous backup with Ventura (with hindsight it might have been that it wanted me to erase my hard drive first).
So I did a network reinstall then migration-assistant to my last Ventura backup, and then cherry-picked any files I knew were newer than that.

One thing I don't understand is why the Mac decided to upgrade itself to Sonoma. I'm the only one who knows the admin password and I don't remember asking for it. I've now turned off "Install MacOS Updates"

Glad to hear you're back up and running. I was going to say "turn off updates" lol.