Chapter 11. Drawing Text with Quartz 2D

With the powerful graphics capabilities of Quartz 2D, one of the most remarkable statements to make about the library is that, on its own, Quartz 2D is not a very good tool for drawing text. The key to that statement is the qualifier "on its own." In a modern, multinational operating system like Mac OS X, the entire process of displaying it can be a very complex. Drawing the text is only the last phase of that process and that is the part where Quartz 2D comes into play.

This chapter presents a short overview of how Mac OS X displays text. The goal is not to cover the entire text pipeline in detail, but to offer some context (no pun intended) to help understand where Quartz 2D fits into the text drawing pipeline. This chapter will also discuss the Mac OS X systems that drive the text pipeline, and provide pointers to documentation where more information on this topic can be found. Finally, you will be introduced some of the very low-level routines that Quartz 2D provides for drawing text and learn how those low-level routines can help create special text-drawing effects.