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0 pointscptskippy9y ago0 comments

Doesn't Quartz use PostScript for rendering the MacOS desktop?

0 comments

NeXT used Display PostScript, and I would create widgets by writing PostScript code.

Quartz is like QuickTime plus something like OpenGL shaders plus something like NeXTStep "display PDF". I have no idea if this encouraged PDF integration into the display model.

Rather, I would say that NeXT, and then Apple, had some great IP and cross-licensing of PostScript and PDF display tech, and so they could ship the OS distribution with PDF as the printing model.

That is, one reason Windows might today re-render PDF → XPS → PDF is that they had needed to create display tech like PDF anyway, and so they did, and this was after humans had been playing with HTML for a while... Silverlight was pretty.

jahewson9y ago

> PDF → XPS → PDF

That's not what's happening unless you have a printer which directly supports PDF. Most likely what is happening on Windows is either:

    PDF → XPS → PCL
    PDF → XPS → PostScript

Depending on the printer. Which makes far more sense and is analogous to what OS X does:

    PDF → Quartz → PCL
    PDF → Quartz → PostScript

There's really no notable difference between these two approaches as both Quartz and XPS are based on the same printing model as PDF. Don't confuse Quartz with PDF just because it offers import/export to PDF - Quartz has its own internal imaging model.

simonh9y ago

NeXT Step did, but they switched to 'Display PDF' in OSX to save licensing costs as PDF is free to use.

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