Printing Straight to PDF

You now have the basic knowledge you need to move anything you can draw in an onscreen view onto a printed page. Your apps can print any view you create and follow the standard Mac app approach to create hard-copy output. But Cocoa also gives you the capability to print directly to a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. PDF has become the standard for publishing and printing documents and is also supported by almost all e-book readers. On other platforms, I have used open-source solutions for creating PDF files from within my applications. With Cocoa, it’s easy to move what your app draws onscreen directly into a PDF file.

Your users can always print directly to PDF from the Print panel itself. The code you’re about to add to your app provides the same feature behind the scenes, without requiring that users must select File⇒Print.