I had this question posted on the British Mac forum.




It has made me curious too. Does anybody here know the answer?

CC

Where did you (or they) see the option?

Quartz is just a trendy name for a set of APIs that allow developers to add in fancy graphics stuff to their apps, isn't it?

So a developer could add in a "export to pdf" or similar, using Quartz.

As for any differences between the two, I don't think there will be any. PDF is PDF, right?? It's a standard, isn't it?

If you are creating a PDF through the print screen (PDF button in the bottom left) it has Quartz in the name. I believe that Windows and other systems can still read these files. I'm not sure why Apple have added that bit in...

Uhm, does it?



Literally two minutes in Google tells me that:

Use of PDF

It is widely stated that Quartz "uses PDF" internally, often by people making comparisons with the Display PostScript technology used in NeXTSTEP (of which Mac OS X is a descendant) and OPENSTEP. Quartz's internal imaging model correlates well with the PDF object graph, making it easy to output PDF to multiple devices.

That's from the wikipedia entry for Quartz.

You can also look at http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/osx_quartz

Bottom line - a .pdf created with the Quartz engine will go anywhere. However, not all .pdf's are created the same, and certainly Adobe generated ones can include other stuff that Quartz can't.

Sorry about being slow coming back to this thread.



It does seem that Quartz pdf or PDF-X is a simpler format than the full PDF. However the full PDF version produces a much smaller file. Nearly 40% smaller for the webpage I just tried it on.

I wonder why?

Depends on the settings used when you make a proper PDF. I expect a quartz PDF will save all the data as it is, ie, raw, whereas when you use acrobat/distiller, you can change colourspaces, resolution, font embedding, image quality and so on.

Thanks Tom,

Prof, how do you get those cool drop shadow and neat clipping on that menu you posted earlier?

Ah, it's a key press.
You know you do Cmd+Shift+4 to do a selection type screen grab?
Well, if you then press space, the cursor turns into a camera and highlights various bits of the UI.
So, it might just be a specific window, or in that case, a menu. It'll grab the UI item, including the drop shadow.

Like this?

Bingo!