Described by director professional markets, Europe Oren Ziv as one of the stars of the show, it uses the Quartz graphics model which features built-in support for PDF.

OS X product manager Chris Bourdon said: By building PDF into the system it gives users and developers all the tools they need. Features include the ability to render PDF documents on the fly at system level and the ability to save and print PDF files in every application.

At the show Apple was showing a simple application for compositing PDF including the ability to rotate, scale and control transparency, all at system level.

Application developers are getting behind OS X including Adobe and Quark, both of which are porting their design and print applications to Carbon, the OS X native code.

OS X is being made available as a public beta release in the summer with commercial launch in January next year. By Barney Cox.