Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Printing /

Chapter 4 - Advanced Printing Features / About Advanced Printing Features

Printing Modes

When you print, QuickDraw GX and the printer driver set up your document for printing based on the specifications in the printer driver. For example, if you print to a PostScript printer, QuickDraw GX converts the picture shapes to the appropriate PostScript directives for you--your application does not need to get involved.

There can be cases, however, in which your application may wish to allow the user to specify an alternative way of printing. Thus, the user may choose to print in a direct mode, which is a mode that bypasses QuickDraw GX imaging. For example, direct mode may be used in the following cases:

• to send text to an ImageWriter with built-in fonts
• to send PostScript-only output; for example, by attaching tag objects to empty shape objects, in which the tag object contains PostScript code

The most common reason that a direct mode may be used is to speed up printing. The major drawback to direct-mode printing is that the user cannot redirect the print file that was created during printing to another printer.

Direct mode is a kind of job format mode. QuickDraw GX supports three job format modes, which are shown in Table 4-3. Variables of type gxJobFormatMode are used to store the print job format mode.

Table 4-3 Print job format modes

Constant	Value	Explanation
gxGraphicsJobFormatMode	'grph'	Graphics output, which is used as the default for QuickDraw GX printing
gxTextJobFormatMode	'text'	Text-only output
gxPostScriptJobFormatMode	'post'	PostScript-only output

A printer driver may not support all of these modes, or it may support additional modes that the application and printer driver agree to support. To support a job format mode other than gxGraphicsJobFormatMode, the application must specify the available modes. The printer driver uses this list of modes to choose its preferred mode. When the user chooses to use direct mode, the user is selecting the printer driver's preferred mode of printing.

For information about how a printer driver sets the preferred mode, see the printer driver chapter of Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Printing Extensions and Drivers. For an example of how to set the available modes and set the preferred mode in response to the user choosing direct mode, see "Implementing Direct-Mode Printing" on page 4-35.

IMPORTANT

Only use gxTextJobFormatMode printing when the user requests direct-mode printing.

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