Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Printing Extensions and Drivers /

Chapter 3 - Printer Drivers

Color Printing

Printing in color is greatly simplified with QuickDraw GX. All of the color-processing information that you need to provide is specified in resources, which means that you don't need to override any messages or call any functions for color printing to work properly.

For raster printing devices, you specify color information in the raster driver preferences ('rdip') resource, which defines the color space, color profile, and other color information for each color plane on the printing device. For PostScript printing devices, you define the PostScript color space in the PostScript preferences ('pdip') resource. Both of these resources are described in the chapter "Printer Resources" in this book.

If you want to modify the color information at run time, you can override the GXSetupImageData message and modify the image data that QuickDraw GX created for your driver. The ImageWriter II printer driver uses the override function SD_SetupImageData to modify the halftone information when printing in graphics mode, as shown in Listing 3-11 on page 3-36. The GXSetupImageData message is described on page 4-92 in the chapter "Printing Messages." The data structures used to represent the imaging data for each imaging system are described in the chapter "Printing Messages" in this book.

For more information about color printing on PostScript printers, see the PostScript Language Reference Manual, 2nd Edition.

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Subtopics

Color Matching

Color Matching on PostScript Devices

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