Adobe Systems introduced Portable Document Format (PDF) and the corresponding PDF imaging model in 1993. Since its introduction, PDF has grown in both popularity and capabilities. The power of the PDF imaging model and the fact that PDF has evolved into a de facto standard are some of the reasons why Apple adopted PDF as the native graphics format for Quartz.

Because of the close relationship between Quartz and the PDF imaging model, Quartz natively supports the drawing of PDF documents into any Quartz context. This support includes PDF documents created with Quartz itself, as well as those created by other PDF creation tools. The ability to treat a page from an arbitrary PDF document just like any other graphic element is an important aspect of Quartz drawing.

The purpose of this chapter is to show how to open existing PDF documents and use them as source graphics. First, you'll take a look at the properties of a PDF document and learn PDF document terminology. Then you'll see how to use Quartz PDF functions to open a PDF document, use PDF as a graphical interchange format, draw pages, rotate pages, handle protected documents, and get information about a PDF document. In "Creating and Examining PDF Documents" (page 435), you'll learn about creating PDF documents with Quartz as well as how to use Quartz to look deeper into the contents of a PDF document.

Mac OS X provides other ways to open and view PDF documents in Tiger. If you only...