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Printing Concepts for Carbon Developers

The Carbon Printing Manager is a collection of system software functions that your application can use to print to any type of supported printer. When printing, your application calls the same Carbon Printing Manager functions regardless of the type of printer selected by the user. An application that uses the Carbon Printing Manager can print in Mac OS 8 and 9 with existing printer drivers and in Mac OS X with new printer drivers.

This chapter provides an overview of the key concepts you need to support printing with the Carbon Printing Manager. It includes the following sections:

• “Overview of Printing Terminology” defines the more frequently used printing terms.

• “High-Level Printing Tasks” lists the high-level tasks that a Carbon application must to do support printing.

• “Printing Objects” provides information about the data types you use to keep track of user selections and other data related to a print job.

• “Printing Functions” gives an overview of the key functions needed by your application to support printing.

• “The Print Loop” describes the code that sends a print job to a printer queue.

• “Sequence, Scope, and Usage” provides guidelines for using printing functions.

• “Page and Paper Rectangles” discusses the page and paper boundaries.

• “If You’ve Used the Old Printing Manager” summarizes the differences between the old Printing Manager and the Carbon Printing Manager.

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