Apple's handling of PDF (Portable Document Format, an adaptation of the PostScript printer language for display and document exchange) in the upcoming releease of OS X is just remarkable. It harkens back to NeXTSTEP, the OS that effectively used PDF for everything. Apple talked a lot about PDF in OS X, but no one understood how deeply ingrained it is in what the Mac does. After the WWDC keynote, I think the rol Apple’s handling of PDF (Portable Document Format, an adaptation of the PostScript printer language for display and document exchange) in the upcoming releease of OS X is just remarkable. It harkens back to NeXTSTEP, the OS that effectively used PDF for everything. Apple talked a lot about PDF in OS X, but no one understood how deeply ingrained it is in what the Mac does.After the WWDC keynote, I think the role of PDF is becoming clearer. When you ask to print a file, a “save as PDF” button appears. This is true in the shipping OS X. But there will soon be two new twists. Preview, the OS X PDF browsing app, has gotten an enormous rendering speed boost. It renders PDFs (which are very complex documents) faster than a browser can render HTML, faster than Word can scroll through a document with embedded graphics. Extremely fast search capabilities will be added to Preview. But I think the biggest feature for budget-constrained users (everyone?) is OS X’s ability to render PostScript to a non-PostScript printer. OS X will make any printer available on the LAN and permit it to be targeted as a PostScript device. Given the price differences between PostScript and non-PostScript printers, that feature will pay for itself quickly. If Apple did it right, it will also eliminate the need for LAN clients to have drivers for the network printer.With Safari 1.0, Apple crossed the threshold to an easily-embeddable HTML renderer. The keynote demonstration of this was showing HTML in Apple’s mail client. That’s not too exciting on the face of it; Outlook Express can do that much. But Microsoft hobbled IE with a beastly embedding interface. Wiring it into an application was incredibly difficult if you wanted any control over the renderer. At MacWorld in February, Apple said it created Safari (then in early beta) as a lightweight embeddable browser. So that was the objective from the jump. Safari is a spectacular standalone, user-driven browser. But for OS X programmers, plugging dynamic HTML and JavaScript into applications is easy enough to do it everywhere. I see Apple doing the same with PDF. Imagine being able to send PostScript-formatted documents to users in e-mail, and have their contents searchable by the mail client. Imagine indexed, searchable, instant-rendering RSS feeds formatted in PDF, with authoring from any (and I mean any Mac application), or from a custom app. Pull in HTML and pump it out as PDF in a few lines of code. Use Keynote to create a slide deck and export it as PDF or HTML. Note that none of this would require that authors or readers have the Adobe Acrobat reader or generator on their machines. Every Mac user has it wired into all of their applications, with “save” and “open” if nowhere else.And don’t forget that with MIME, one mail message or posting can include three representations for users with different capabilities: Plain text, HTML and PDF.When this ships and is put to widespread use, it will immediately destroy the Word and PowerPoint formats as ways to move rich documents around. The next hurdle Apple needs to jump is editability. But making PDFs indexable and searchable–crack a PDF open in an editor if you want to see why this is so hard–predicts editing capabilities in a future release. It’s such a shame Windows users will miss out. Or maybe Apple will take pity on them. If it chooses to bring some of these capabilities to Windows, it shouldn’t feel too rushed. Mac users should have some time to laugh at Windows users, something they haven’t been able to do for some years. ——– Technology Industry