Mainly Macintosh

Taking Advantage of PDF Kit in Your Cocoa Application

Apple has written a short article on how to support PDF files in your Cocoa application programs you write yourself. That is one part you do not have to write. Apple has done it for you.

Taking Advantage of PDF Kit in Your Cocoa Application:

PDF has become a de facto standard in the world because it makes it easy for users to create, distribute, and view documents.


And now making the PDF document format available in your Cocoa application is easy, with PDF Kit. Available in Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, PDF Kit allows you to display and manipulate PDF
documents in your application without writing a lot of custom file handling code. By implementing aspects of Adobe's PDF specification for
you, PDF Kit minimizes development time on your part. Even Apple's own applications such as Safari and Preview use
PDF Kit to display PDF content.

It is nice that Apple has included lightning fast PDF viewers in the Macintosh for a couple of years.

With Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) they have consolidated their gains, and made it easy for any programmer/program to help his program get its PDF on as the saying goes.

Microsoft was so entranced with PDF that they wanted to include similar support to that which Apple has for it in their own OS, coming out sometime in 2007. However, Adobe put its foot down and so far, it does not look like the two companies are able to come to an agreement.

Fortunately, Apple has.

posted by John Collins @ 11:30 PM