[1] Its underlying drawing platform was an object oriented, resolution-independent, retained mode system, making it much easier for programmers to perform common tasks (compared to the original QuickDraw).
Additionally, GX added various curve-drawing commands that had been lacking from QD, as well as introducing TrueType as its basic font system.
GX also suffered from causing a number of incompatibilities in existing programs, notably those that had developed their own QD extensions.
This, coupled with opposition from an important fraction of the developer market, especially PostScript owner Adobe, and a lack of communication from Apple about the benefits of GX and why users should adopt it, led to the technology being sidelined.
QuickDraw GX saw little development after its initial release and was formally "killed" with the purchase of NeXT and the eventual adoption of the Quartz imaging model in Mac OS X.
[3] GX appears to have started in a roundabout fashion, originally as an outline font system that would be added to the Mac OS.
Included in the font rendering engine were a number of generally useful extensions, notably a fixed point coordinate system and a variety of curve drawing commands.
Another project, apparently unrelated at first, attempted to address problems with the conversion from QuickDraw into various printer output formats.
Whereas developers had earlier been forced to write their own code to convert their QuickDraw on-screen display to PostScript for printing, under the new printer architecture such conversions would be provided by the OS.
Additionally the new system was deliberately engineered to be as flexible as possible, supporting not only QD and PS printers, but potentially other standards such as Hewlett-Packard's PCL as well.
Middle-managers were involved in an intense turf war for much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, gathering projects together into "über-projects" that contained enough important code to make them "unkillable".
While PostScript printing had never been easy, over the years since the release of the original LaserWriter, developers had built up a library of solutions to common problems.
Although Apple continued to state GX was the future of graphics on the Mac, by 1995 it was clear they were no longer "pushing" it, frustrating its supporters.
Although all of this state was held in the gxMapping for that object, GX also provided "wrapper" commands like "rotate" to make the API simpler to use.
This distinction was important in that such contextual substitutions occurred at rendering time, without any changes to the source character string.
Contextual substitutions can be controlled by enabling or disabling the composition options of a TrueType GX font in WorldText on the Mac OS 9 CD or in TextEdit in Mac OS X. Fonts commonly have features called "common ligatures" (such as the "fl" example), "rare ligatures" (such as inscriptional ME and MD ligatures), "archaic non-terminal s" (for automatically substituting the letter "s" with the archaic form that looked more like an "f", except at the ends of words), and even choices between entirely separate sets of glyph designs, such as more and less ornate forms.
Keith McGreggor was the manager of the graphics group and the primary developer of the color architecture for QuickDraw GX, and Robert Johnson was the resident mathematician.
[further explanation needed] Other developers on the project include: Dave G. Opstad was the architect of the typography engine and the shaping tables in Apple's fonts.