Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Programmer's Overview / Part 1 - Getting Started With QuickDraw GX

Chapter 1 - An Introduction to QuickDraw GX

Printing

In addition to all of the functionality provided through its objects, QuickDraw GX also provides some elegant new features and capabilities.
In printing, for example, QuickDraw GX allows your application to support
a host of new printing-related features. The next few sections introduce
these features, and then describe the QuickDraw GX printing process, the
new printing-related dialog boxes that present the user interface to the new printing features, and the printing-related objects your application uses to implement these features.

Features of QuickDraw GX Printing

QuickDraw GX printing is divided into three sets of features:

• Core printing features, which allow users to
  • use the new Page Setup dialog box to set up simple print jobs
  • print documents by dragging document icons to desktop printer icons
  • use the new Print dialog box to redirect print jobs
  • print a single copy of a document with the Print One Copy menu item
  • move the Page Setup, Custom Page Setup, and Print dialog boxes so they can find information in an underlying window that might have been obscured by the dialog box
  • save printing setup information with their documents

• Page formatting and dialog box customization features, which allow users to
  • use the expanded versions of the Page Setup, Custom Page Setup, and Print dialog boxes to use features provided by printing extensions or by your application
  • use the new Custom Page Setup dialog box to specify a separate format for each page of a document

• Advanced printing features, which allow users to
  • create portable digital documents (print-and-view documents)
  • restrict the printable area of a page

Figure 1-5 shows an example of a desktop printer icon. Users create these icons using the Chooser desk accessory. To print a document using a desktop printer, the user drags a document icon to the desktop printer icon or selects the document icon and chooses the Print command from the Finder's File menu. A user can create multiple desktop printer icons and can print queues to them simultaneously.

Figure 1-5 A sample desktop printer icon

In this figure, the user is printing the document "My file" to the printer "Gutenberg."

Figure 1-6 depicts another new feature of QuickDraw GX printing: specifying separate formats for each page of a document.

Figure 1-6 Multiple formats in a single document

In this figure, the document has three pages: a page of addresses, a business letter, and a spreadsheet. The printed version of the document has three formats: envelope, portrait, and landscape.

Chapter 8, "Printing," gives examples of printing a document with multiple page formats.

The Printing Process

The printing process consists of separate phases. In the beginning phases, your application responds to user requests by calling QuickDraw GX printing functions. For example, if the user chooses the Page Setup menu item, your application calls a QuickDraw GX function to display the Page Setup dialog box. QuickDraw GX uses your application's printing objects to record the user's selections. As another example, if the user chooses the Print menu item, your application displays the Print dialog box. Depending on what the user chooses, your application may respond by calling a QuickDraw GX function to print one or more pages of the document.

In the later printing phases, QuickDraw GX spools the appropriate pages of the document into a spool file, despools the spooled pages into instructions for the printer, and sends the instructions to the printer hardware.

The examples in Chapter 8, "Printing," illustrate the printing process in more detail. For complete information, see Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Printing.

Printing Dialog Boxes

QuickDraw GX provides four kinds of printing-related dialog boxes:

• The Page Setup dialog box allows the user to specify a format for an entire document.
• The Custom Page Setup dialog box allows the user to specify separate formats for each page of a document.
• The Print dialog box allows the user to choose a printer and specify a page range and number of copies to print.
• The Status dialog box informs the user that the application is spooling a document.

The Page Setup, Custom Page Setup, and Print dialog boxes each have condensed view and an expanded view; the Status dialog box has only a
single view. As an example, Figure 1-7 shows the condensed view of the
Print dialog box.

Figure 1-7 The Print dialog box

When the user clicks the More Choices button, the expanded Print dialog box is displayed, as shown in Figure 1-8.

Figure 1-8 The expanded Print dialog box

The expanded Print dialog box is divided into panels, which display and collect related pieces of information. In Figure 1-8, the expanded view is currently displaying the General panel. Each panel is associated with an icon in a scrolling list to the left of the dialog box.

Figure 1-9 shows the Print Time panel. This panel allows a user to specify information related to a particular print job, such as the print job's priority and designated time to print.

Figure 1-9 The Print Time panel of the expanded Print dialog box

QuickDraw GX provides resource types you can use to add panels to the printing dialog boxes.