Technical Q&As

GXPD 12 - QuickDraw GX General Print Panel (1-May-95)

Important for all Apple Printing and Graphics Developers:

The information in this Technical Q & A is still relevant up to and including Mac OS 7.6 with QuickDraw GX 1.1.5. Beginning with the release of Mac OS 8.0, however, Apple plans to deliver a system which incorporates QuickDraw GX graphics and typography only. QuickDraw GX printer drivers and GX printing extensions will not be supported in Mac OS 8.0 or in future Mac OS releases. Apple's goal is to simplify the user experience of printing by unifying the Macintosh graphic and printing architectures and standardizing on the classic Printing Manager.

For details on Apple's official announcement, refer to </dev/technotes/gxchange.html>

Q There are three options on the QuickDraw GX General Print Panel that we would like to move to one of our own panels. We have solutions that differ from the default ones, and we want to rename these solutions and associate them with our printer. How can I eliminate the following options from the General Print Panel?

Collation
Paper Feed: Automatic/Manual
Quality

A There is no mechanism in GX to remove panel items from the standard print panels, except for the Quality item. The Quality collection item (gxQualityTag = 'qual'), whose structure is defined in PrintingManager.h, has a Boolean field called disableQuality. To eliminate the Quality item from the panel, specify true for the disableQuality field in your driver.

Although you cannot remove the other items, you can disable them (dim them in the panel) by getting the collection item and setting the locked attribute by calling SetCollectionItemInfo().

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