Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide

Saving to PDF

Although making a graph (or any other picture) is a nice start, it’s important to be able to save the graph in a format that can work with other Mac OS X applications. For example, you might want to put the graph in a word processor document that you are making with Microsoft Word, or paste the image into a Create drawing.

One of the most common file formats in the graphics industry today is the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) standard. EPS contains a series of device-independent commands that can be used to draw any image on any graphics device.

EPS is a great way to move graphics between applications. EPS retains all of the information that was originally used to draw the image: fonts, line strokes, bitmaps — it’s all in there. EPS images can be scaled and displayed, and they’re beautiful and easy to work with.

But over the years, Adobe PostScript has not been a runaway success in the marketplace. Although PostScript was extremely popular on the NeXTSTEP, Unix, and Macintosh operating systems, it never really caught on in the Windows world. Throughout the 1990s, there were also a growing number of security concerns with PostScript, because it is more than an imaging model — it’s a programming language. Finally, as PostScript was extended, some of its device-independence was lost.

In the 1990s, Adobe developed a new graphics imaging format called the Portable Document Format (PDF). In many ways, PDF is a successor to PostScript. Like PostScript, it is device-independent ...