OS X display rendered in PDF?

[cb911]

is the OS X display rendered in PDF?

i was just reading this from MacOSrumors.com...

Since Mac OS X display is rendered in PDF...


How much effort would be involved in using an Expose-like feature to give a 12" PowerBook (or any Mac) a scaled "virtual" resolution of 1280x 1024 or more by shrinking what's on the screen to mimic the content that would be on a larger screen?


Quartz extreme could definitely handle it.


It would be nice to have larger, higher resolution displays be able -- at the sacrifice of resolution -- to display more data on a screen.

so that means that whatever i view on the screen is actually a PDF? that's kinda weird, i've never thought about that before.

i bet some creative developers could do something with having a higher resolution virtual desktop...

 

[HexMonkey]

AFAIK it is. Unlike Mac OS 9, the system remembers the contents of every window (as pdfs), so a window doesn't have to be redrawn if a previously obscured part of the window is shown (this is from memory, it might not be 100% correct). In fact, if you type command-shift-4, then space, and click on a mostly obscured window, the screenshot (a pdf file) will contain the whole window, even the obscured parts.

As for a virtual resolution, I considered adding a similar feature to a game I was making on Mac OS 8 a few years ago. I never really thought about it on this scale though, it could be very useful. And when detail is important, it could have a magnification option similar to that of the Dock to make the area near the cursor actual size.

 

[Rincewind42]

No, the screen isn't rendered as PDF, but it does use a PDF-style compositor (the software that decides what color each pixel should be). As such you can get all the nice effects you can get with PDF on screen. Images are not typically stored in PDF format, but you can create a PDF file with the same code that you use to draw to the screen normally (using what is called a PDF "context" - a drawing area that records your drawing actions as a PDF file). But most drawing contexts are the ordinary bit-map variety that has been used for over 20 years.

 

[Sparky's]

No, the screen isn't rendered as PDF, but it does use a PDF-style compositor (the software that decides what color each pixel should be). As such you can get all the nice effects you can get with PDF on screen. Images are not typically stored in PDF format, but you can create a PDF file with the same code that you use to draw to the screen normally (using what is called a PDF "context" - a drawing area that records your drawing actions as a PDF file). But most drawing contexts are the ordinary bit-map variety that has been used for over 20 years.

Ditto

In addition what the post may have refered to was that now in OS X when you take a screen shot (shift+cmnd+3) a PDF is generated to the desktop. That may have lead the reader to think that the screen was rendered in PDF.

 

[cb911]

okay, so the screen isn't actually rendered as a PDF, but it uses the same method to render the screen as is used to render a PDF?

 

[JFreak]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartz/ says: Based on version 1.4 of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specification

"based on" equals "not exactly, but very close". so no, it's not pdt, but yes, one can say the screen is rendered with pdf technology.

 

[AppleMatt]

I doubt the idea would work, it would go all blurry and then get too small&blurry to be useful.

AppleMatt