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Article:
  Steve Jobs and the History of Cocoa, Part Two
Subject:   PDF vs PostScript
Date:   2002-05-15 09:21:50
From:   kapinos
"Unable or unwilling to cut a deal with Adobe for Display PostScript, Apple decided to remove it from the operating system and replace it with a next-generation drawing subsystem called Quartz. (The Quartz system uses Adobe’s Portable Document Format as an interchange file format. Nevertheless, Quartz implements PDF without a line of Adobe code -- and thus without a cent of royalties due to Adobe."


...wrong conclusion again, as Quartz (which is a marketing term for Core Graphics in Mac OS X) is using PDF model (an open standard developed by Adobe Systems Inc) as opposed to PostScript (used in NextStep and then in OpenStep) due to its speed of rendering in the first place and only then due to the licensing terms (been made free by Adobe).

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  • PDF vs PostScript
    2002-05-16 15:23:19  rudybee [View]

    No way! The licensing fees were a real issue, as every developer for YellowBox or OPENSTEP for Windows will confirm (the end customer was getting hurt by those fees there, the fee was the reason why the runtime of these frameworks for Windows was not free).

    About the speed? I don't have any numbers to support my claim, but the Display PostScript is faster than Quartz. That will definitely change with future releases of OS X, but the DPS shipping with OPENSTEP/Rhapsody was highly optimized (10 years) and faster that you'd think.

    Rudy