Printer Drivers
A QuickDraw GX printer driver defines the characteristics of a printer and the services the printer provides. The printer driver also translates QuickDraw GX shapes into instructions or operators that the printer understands, such as PostScript(TM). In reality, much of a printer driver's standard functionality, such as PostScript conversion, is performed by QuickDraw GX for the printer driver.From the application developer's point of view, it is useful to group printer driver-supplied features, printing extension-supplied features, and QuickDraw GX rendering features together because they are represented by the printer object. You can query the printer object for the characteristics of a printer, whether set by the printer driver, printing extension, or QuickDraw GX.
For example, your application can query the printer object to determine how best to print to the device that the printer object represents. Many of the default settings, such as page size and landscape or portrait orientation, are specified by the printer driver.
The printer driver is responsible for providing the printer icon to display on the desktop. Figure 1-4 shows examples of desktop printer icons for various devices.
Figure 1-4 Default QuickDraw GX desktop printer icons
These devices need not represent actual physical devices on the system. In particular, the portable digital document printer driver, represented by the PDD Maker GX icon, is used only to create a document that is packaged ready-to-view on another computer.
Main | Page One | What's New | Apple Computer, Inc. | Find It | Contact Us | Help
