The Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is the native file format of Adobe® and Apple OS X.
The goal is to enable users to exchange and view electronic documents easily and reliably, independently of the environment
in which they were created. PDF relies on the same imaging model as the PostScript® page description language to describe text
and graphics in a device-independent and resolution-independent manner. PDF is an industry standard for distributing documents.
OS X contains a powerful 2D graphics imaging library called Quartz.
A large part of what gives the Mac OS X user interface the rich look that it has, is the use of Quartz by the Aqua user
interface (GUI) and the built-in application toolkits (frameworks).
"Quartz" is a term aimed at consumers. It is also known as 'Core Graphics' to many
programmers, abbreviated as 'CG'. The Quartz 2D imaging model is based on the PDF imaging model. The Quartz 2D drawing
library allows applications to draw text, curves and shapes, images and Portble Document Format (PDF) documents in amazingly
flexible ways. In fact, Apple created its own graphics library based on the PDF imaging model, enhancing it in various ways,
including the support of alpha transparency. In addition to alpha compositing, this graphics library supports anti-aliasing,
which produces higher-quality results on low-resolution output devices such as screen displays.
The PDF file format is the graphics metafile format for Quartz. Hence there is no down-sampling
nor lossy compression when producing PDF documents.
Eccron Technologies' world-map application "EccroWorld" uses the power of
Quartz to produce PDF documents.
