Understanding Call Sequence and Scope

The Carbon Printing Manager enforces a sequence of steps in the printing loop, and defines a valid scope for each routine. This means that your application must call certain routines before calling others.

Routines used out of sequence will return an error result of kPMOutOfScope . In the following example, the PMDefaultPageFormat function is called before PMBegin , and would therefore return the kPMOutOfScope result code:

err = PMDefaultPageFormat( aPageFormatRef ); /* out of scope call */

PMBegin();

All calls to Carbon Printing Manager functions must be made inside a PMBegin / PMEnd block. Routines that operate on a specific page have the further requirement that they be called inside a PMBeginPage / PMEndPage block. Note that the PMPrintSettings and PMPageFormat objects are valid only within the PMBegin / PMEnd block in which they are allocated, as they are automatically disposed by the PMEnd function.

The following table shows the scope of the most commonly used printing functions.