Technical Q&A

GXPD 44 - Flattening Objects Separately (9-Jan-97)

Important for all Apple Printing and Graphics Developers:

The information in this Technical Q & A is still relevant up to and including Mac OS 7.6 with QuickDraw GX 1.1.5. Beginning with the release of Mac OS 8.0, however, Apple plans to deliver a system which incorporates QuickDraw GX graphics and typography only. QuickDraw GX printer drivers and GX printing extensions will not be supported in Mac OS 8.0 or in future Mac OS releases. Apple's goal is to simplify the user experience of printing by unifying the Macintosh graphic and printing architectures and standardizing on the classic Printing Manager.

For details on Apple's official announcement, refer to </dev/technotes/gxchange.html>

Q I'm a developer working on supporting Quickdraw GX printing in my application. I've seen APIs and documentation on flattening Jobs, Shapes, and Collections. I haven't seen any way to flatten other objects, however. Ideally, I'd like to be able to flatten a Format object and PaperType object so they can be stored separately from their related Job. Can this be done?

A Currently, there is no way to flatten a format or papertype object without flattening its associated job. The overhead of the flattened job is very little, though, so it should not be a major hit to simply flatten the associated job. We may provide other flattening functions in a future release of QuickDraw GX, but for the current releases you'll need to flatten the entire job.

--Ingrid Kelly
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