Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Objects /

Chapter 1 - Introduction to QuickDraw GX / Printing With QuickDraw GX

Advanced Printing Features

QuickDraw GX includes several advanced printing features that allow your application to provide additional capabilities for users and to optimize output for particular printers:

• You can use direct mode printing, which takes advantage of a printer's built-in features, such as fast text streaming with built-in fonts.
• You can use alternative representations of QuickDraw GX objects. When printing, QuickDraw GX translates the objects of a shape into device-specific information.
  For optimum performance on particular devices, you can assign specialized tag objects known as synonyms to printed shapes and associated objects, to provide an alternative representation of the graphics objects. You can also use tag objects to select specific printing options, such as pen table information, for vector devices.
• You can display your own printing status information. QuickDraw GX allows you
  to prevent the display of the standard QuickDraw GX Status dialog box during printing and to substitute status information from your own application.
• You can open and display the pages of a PDD or other print file. If
  QuickDraw GX is installed, any application--including applications that are
  not QuickDraw GX-aware--can create a document that can be viewed or printed
  from any other computer that has QuickDraw GX installed. The PDD also provides font security in that the font data is "locked" into the document and only the minimum font information is contained therein.