Recently, we looked at Mac OS X and its font capabilities. But there’s a PDF angle involved as well, thanks to Quartz.
Quartz is the graphics engine of Mac OS X that makes possible much of the “eye candy” (transparency, traffic widgets, animated icons, etc.) in the Aqua user interface. But it does so much more.
Quartz is based on Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), a superset of PostScript. Much of Quartz’s functionality is available to current Mac OS users through vector graphics applications. But Quartz moves the functionality into the OS itself.
Quartz features built-in support for PDF, enabling users to embed and manipulate PDF data within any Mac OS X native application. You can also print to PDF, which gives you the ability to output any document as a PDF file.
And when it comes to the nifty new fonts that come with Mac OS X, applications that have been Carbonized or “Cocoa-ized” for the operating system can save files as PDF, and — if these fonts are used — they’ll be embedded in the PDF to ensure that the document is displayed exactly as it was created.
You can easily create Quartz-enhanced, graphics rich documents that can be shared with anyone. As Apple says, “since this capability is available to all Mac OS X applications, Macintosh developers now have a whole new palette of creative tools at their disposal.”
To create a PDF file with a Mac OS X application, go to the File menu and choose Print. In the Print panel, click the Preview button. Mac OS X will save the PDF and display it using the included Preview application. You can then select Save As PDF from the File menu and, voila, that’s it. As we said, the cool thing is that this functionality is available to every application that’s been optimized for Mac OS X.
Also, in regards to fonts, Multiple Master fonts are no longer supported by Apple, beginning with Mac OS X. You can still use Multiple Master fonts with your Classic applications.