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Overview of Quartz 2D

Quartz 2D is a two-dimensional drawing engine accessible from all Mac OS X application environments outside of the kernel. You can use the Quartz 2D application programming interface (API) to gain access to features such as path-based drawing, layer drawing, painting with transparency, shading, drawing shadows, transparency layers, color management, anti-aliased rendering, PDF document generation, and PDF metadata access.

The Mac OS X graphics and imaging architecture is shown in Figure 1-1. Quartz 2D is implemented in the Core Graphics framework, a part of the Application Services umbrella framework. Your program links to ApplicationServices.framework to call Quartz 2D routines directly.

Quartz 2D can work with all other graphics and imaging technologies–Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, and QuickTime. It’s possible to create an image in Quartz from a QuickTime graphics importer, using the QuickTime function GraphicsImportCreateCGImage. See QuickTime API Reference for details.

Core Image and Core Video are technologies that are available in Mac OS X v10.4. “Moving Data Between Quartz 2D and Core Image” describes how you can provide images to Core Image, which is a framework that supports image processing.

Notice that QuickDraw is not depicted in Figure 1-1; Quartz 2D replaces QuickDraw. If you still have QuickDraw code in your application, you can read Quartz Programming Guide for QuickDraw Developers for strategies on how to replace your old QuickDraw code in order to take advantage of the sophisticated drawing engine available through Quartz 2D.

Graphics hardware, shown in Figure 1-1 as the foundational layer, is important for high-performance graphics. Whenever possible, Quartz 2D leverages the power of the graphics hardware.

The following sections provide an overview of the key concepts you need to understand about the Quartz 2D drawing environment:

• “The Page”

• “Drawing Destinations: The Graphics Context”

• “Quartz 2D Opaque Data Types”

• “Graphics States”

• “Quartz 2D Coordinates”

• “Memory Management: Object Ownership”

• “Quartz Performance: A Look Under the Hood”

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