Color Graphics
QuickDraw GX is a powerful graphics engine with integrated color support, a wide range of graphics primitives, and sophisticated modes of drawing. It can manipulate images in quite general ways, leading to many useful special effects. Highlights of the graphics capabilities of QuickDraw GX include the following:
- Multiple types of graphic shapes. QuickDraw GX directly supports geometric shapes (points, lines, rectangles, polygons, curves, and paths), bitmap shapes, and picture shapes (shapes that are collections of other shapes).
- Multiple types of typographic shapes. QuickDraw GX directly supports text shapes, glyph shapes, and layout shapes, which range from simple unstyled lines of text to multilanguage, multifont text lines with sophisticated typographic features.
- Device independence. All positions and measurements in QuickDraw GX are independent of the resolution of any imaging device.
- Flexible and powerful transformations. QuickDraw GX uses mathematical mappings to easily manipulate positions, dimensions, and distortions of shapes.
- Easy stylistic variations. QuickDraw GX gives you great flexibility in setting shape characteristics such as pen width, patterns, font, and text face.
- Device-independent colors. All colors in QuickDraw GX can be defined in a device-independent way and then converted to device-specific colors on any device.
- Direct support for many color spaces, including luminance (for grayscale), RGB (for monitors), YIQ (for color video broadcast), CMYK (for printing), CIE and related device-independent color spaces (for colorimetrics).
- Automatic color matching. QuickDraw GX automatically uses color profiles and the Macintosh ColorSync utilities to guarantee that a document's colors as displayed on a monitor match as closely as possible a printed copy of the same document. If you need to, you can also manually control the color matching process.
- A sophisticated yet straightforward rendering mechanism. The mechanism allows multiple simultaneous views of a single shape, with different scales and orientations, on single or multiple devices, with simultaneous updating of all views if the shape is edited.
The color graphics capabilities of QuickDraw GX are described both in this book and in Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Graphics.
- Compatibility With QuickDraw
- QuickDraw GX is does not replace the original QuickDraw
architecture built into the Macintosh toolbox. An application that
is not QuickDraw GX-aware is unaffected if QuickDraw GX is
installed on the system. A QuickDraw GX application can also use standard QuickDraw calls and convert QuickDraw picture files into QuickDraw GX shapes. See the Macintosh environment chapter of
Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Environment and Utilities for more information.