The Quartz Graphics Model

To write effective code for 2D drawing in Cocoa, it is necessary to understand the graphics model that underlies the Quartz 2D graphics layer in Mac OS X. It is beyond the scope of this book to give every tiny detail of the graphics model, but this section provides, in the most general terms, a bird’s eye view of what is available and the capabilities of those offerings. Most of the rest of this chapter and the two that follow flesh out the facilities described in this section.

The Quartz graphics model is fundamentally based on Adobe’s PDF standard, which in turn takes most of its ideas from the PostScript graphics language. The graphics model is complex, and this book can only touch on the most basic concepts. For ...

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