There are occasions, though, when you need to add to or change a PDF document, and the market for PDF forms has flourished in recent years. Many are reference manuals, legal documents, and other material which you wouldn’t want to be tampered with. I have innumerable PDF documents on this iMac going back to the very first release of PDF in 1993, all of which have been unchanged since they were first created. Like PostScript before it, and unlike Rich Text and HTML, PDF is not designed to be interactively edited – which is one of its strengths. The latter is supported by PDFKit, which is part of the Quartz graphics system, used for display and printing. MacOS has several key document formats, including Rich Text (RTF, used throughout styled text content via TextKit), HTML (in WebKit), plain text of course, XML (particularly in Property Lists), and PDF. Adobe built much of its business on the licence fees for PostScript, but PDF was standardised in an open format (ISO 32000) and is thus free to use. PDF is based on PostScript, but has proved superior in both performance and cost.
Pdf utility for mac mac os#
When NeXT and Mac merged to form the beginnings of Mac OS X, Display PostScript was replaced with PDF as the central graphics standard for both display and printing, in what was dubbed Quartz 2D – which lives on today in macOS. At the time, many thought this to be a mistake, as PostScript wasn’t as efficient a graphics language as QuickDraw, as it had been designed to render pages in slower time in print engines. With Macs sticking to its proprietary QuickDraw, when the NeXT computer was developed, its designers opted for Display PostScript as the centrepiece of its graphics. To create a PDF document in those days, you had to print to a PostScript file, then use Adobe’s Distiller app to convert that into PDF. PostScript was for high-end printers, particularly Apple’s LaserWriter which enabled the Mac to lead the ‘desktop publishing revolution’.Īdobe Acrobat PDF was but one contender among several for a universal document format, which would enable anyone to distribute electronic copies of documents with arbitrary content.
You may still bump into it now, in its PICT format graphics files. QuickDraw was for the display, and had some amazing advanced features. When PDF was introduced in 1993, Macs already had two vital graphics languages: QuickDraw and PostScript. PDF came out of PostScript, the original page description language for laser printers which was developed by the founders of Adobe, including John Warnock and Charles Geschke, during the early 1980s.
Pdf utility for mac portable#
I’ve been using Portable Document Format (PDF) for over twenty-five years now, and despite my initial misgivings, it has established itself as one of the most important document formats.
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