Resolution of PDF when used on mac

The PDF itself is resolution independent. If you use 300 dpi vector images in the source document from which the PDF is created, or a mixture of text that has been converted to outlines (vector) and layered among 300 dpi images — then that content will be 300 dpi at the printer and look amazingly sharp.

If you are using Apple's Pages v7.3, your text is raster, and the clipart is 72 dpi — unless you dropped in some vector artwork. If you introduce transparency into the Pages document with Text box backgrounds, borders around images, reduced opacity, or gradients — all of that will get rasterized at 72 dpi. You will get a phone call from the printer politely informing you that your PDF is ____.

To add to VikingOSX's info. PDFs are container files. They have no resolution of their own. It's what you put in them that matters.

Apple has upgraded their PDF generator since I last looked (thank goodness!). Instead of turning your images into highly compressed JPEGs, it now embeds images as PNG, which is a lossless image format. A 21.7 MB test TIFF images turns into a 6.3 MB PDF. Extracting the image shows it's a PNG that's visually identical to the TIFF. No blocky butchering as you would get from a high compressed JPEG.

Fonts and vector images (Illustrator, Freehand, etc.) have no resolution. They're vector. Mathematical shapes.

Bad news, Apple's PDF generator is still not something you should use for production work. Stick with Acrobat Pro.

1. It's nice that the PDF gave me an identically nice image to the source TIFF, but Apple's PDF generator changed the set resolution of the image from 300 to 72 dpi. It was still the same size (same number of pixels height/width) as the original, so no data was scaled out. But your vendor will still flag that 72 dpi setting as a problem.
2. CMYK images get converted to RGB whether you want them to or not. You have no control or choice.
3. All images have their color profiles stripped. Everything is untagged color. That's bad.

If you mean Apple's built in PDF generator, then everything it creates beats the tar out of raster images and reduces them to a highly compressed JPEG at 72 dpi.