Inside Macintosh: Imaging With QuickDraw /

Preface - About This Book

This book, Inside Macintosh: Imaging With QuickDraw, describes how to create images, display them in black and white or color, and print them using QuickDraw--the imaging engine available on all Macintosh computers. The chapters in this book and the information they contain are summarized here.

• "Introduction to QuickDraw" introduces you to the terms, concepts, and capabilities of QuickDraw.
• "Basic QuickDraw" describes how to create and manage the basic graphics port--the drawing environment in which your application can create graphics and text in either black and white or eight basic colors.
• "QuickDraw Drawing" explains the routines and data structures--common to both basic QuickDraw and Color QuickDraw--that your application can use to draw lines, rectangles, rounded rectangles, ovals, arcs, wedges, polygons, and regions, and to copy images from one graphics port to another. This chapter also describes the routines that you can use to perform calculations and other manipulations of these shapes--including comparing them and finding their unions and intersections.
• "Color QuickDraw" describes the version of QuickDraw that provides a range of color and grayscale capabilities to your application. You should read this chapter if your application needs to use shades of gray or more colors than the eight predefined colors provided by basic QuickDraw.
• "Graphics Devices" describes how Color QuickDraw manages video devices so that your application can draw to a window's graphics port without regard to the capabilities of the screen--even if the window spans more than one screen.
• "Offscreen Graphics Worlds" describes how you can improve your application's appearance and performance by constructing images in offscreen graphics worlds before drawing them onscreen.
• "Pictures" describes how to create and draw QuickDraw pictures, which are sequences of saved drawing commands that your application can share among documents, even among documents created by other applications.
• "Cursor Utilities" describes how to create and use cursors, including color and animated cursors, for indicating the relative mouse location onscreen and for indicating when your application is performing a lengthy task.
• "Printing Manager" describes how your application can print by creating a printing graphics port and drawing into it using QuickDraw routines. This chapter also explains how to implement the user interface that helps users when they wish to print.
• Appendix A, "Picture Opcodes," describes opcodes used by the DrawPicture procedure to determine what object to draw or what mode to change for subsequent drawing. Your application generally should not read or write picture opcodes directly but should instead use the QuickDraw routines described in the chapter "Pictures" for generating and processing the opcodes. Picture opcodes are listed in this appendix for your application's debugging purposes.
• Appendix B, "Using Picture Comments for Printing," describes how your application can use picture comments to instruct printer drivers to perform graphics operations that QuickDraw does not support.

Most applications draw in windows, which are rectangular areas that are usually subsets of the screen. Each window represents its own QuickDraw graphics port. When you create a window, the Window Manager uses QuickDraw to create a graphics port in which the window's contents are displayed. This book describes how to draw inside a window. See the chapter "Window Manager" in Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Toolbox Essentials for a complete description of creating and managing the windows inside which your application draws.

In addition to the features described in this book, QuickDraw also provides extensive text support. However, most of that support is not described in this book; for information on handling text in your application, see instead Inside Macintosh: Text.

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Preface Contents

Format of a Typical Chapter

Conventions Used in This Book

Special Fonts

Types of Notes

Empty Strings

Assembly-Language Information

The Development Environment