Chapter 14. Working with PDF

Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is the file format that Adobe created to facilitate the distribution of multi-page documents. As seen in Chapter 2, “From QuickDraw to Quartz 2D,” Quartz 2D bases its imaging model on the graphics systems of PostScript and PDF. In the early days of PDF, a program called the Distiller would execute PostScript code and collect all the drawing commands into a PDF file. When a PDF viewer played back those commands, the user would see all of the drawing that would have been done by the original PostScript program without having to reinterpret that program itself.

Quartz 2D uses PDF as its metafile format. A metafile captures a series of drawing commands that create an image, rather ...

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