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Font Services in Mac OS X

Figure 1-1 shows the interaction of applications with Mac OS X font services. Various applications (Cocoa, Carbon, HTML-based) communicate with the Application Services framework through the QuickDraw or Quartz frameworks. Each of these frameworks communicate with the ATS client framework. Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI) communicates through the QuickDraw and Quartz subframeworks but can also call directly into the ATS client framework. The ATS client framework provides the programming interface used by developers (ATS for Fonts) and the private programming interface used by the system.

The ATS client communicates directly to the ATS server, which is a separate process. The ATS server maintains the font database and performs such tasks as activating and deactivating fonts, supplying glyph outline data, and obtaining information from font tables. The ATS server is discussed in more detail in “The ATS Server, Notifications, and Queries.”

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