Useful Mac OS X Terms: What is Quartz?

Quartz is the one of the graphics services in Mac OS X, the others are OpenGL and QuickTime.
Quartz is the two dimensional graphics service in Mac OS X. It is the modern heart of the Mac OS X user experience, superseding QuickDraw and related managers. Quartz directly supports the Aqua user experience by displaying crisp two-dimensional graphics to create the user interface, including on-the-fly rendering and anti-aliasing. Quartz is based on the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF is the standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. PDF is a universal file format that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colors and graphics of any source document--regardless of the application and platform used to create it.
Published Date: Feb 20, 2012