Mac OS X's streamlined printing system provides a flexible and powerful printing environment that is easy to use, easy to enhance, and easy to support. Quartz 2D, Mac OS X's powerful graphics and display engine, provides rendering and conversion services for delivering high quality printed output from your applications.

Developers can easily add printing support to Cocoa, Carbon, and BSD UNIX applications. Printer vendors can add support for Mac OS X by supplying modules to extend Apple's interface rather than writing code that overrides it.

The printing system in Mac OS X is based on the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS), a dynamic cross-platform printing solution for UNIX environments. Mac OS X supports a wide variety of PostScript and raster printers and offers advanced features such as network job spooling using the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), plus PDF and Quartz imaging. Quartz 2D supports a resolution-independent PDF drawing model so that applications can print high-quality, color-managed output on all classes of supported printers. When users print or save to a PDF file, the Quartz engine retains the quality of onscreen images.

Carbon and Cocoa applications use their respective APIs to support user print requests. Carbon provides the Printing Manager API. Cocoa provides a set of classes that support printing, and underneath calls through to the printing API defined in the Application Services and Carbon frameworks. This common-base API means you don't have to worry about tradeoffs between these architectures.

Software developers can easily extend the Mac OS X printing system to make new printing features available to customers. Mac OS X has introduced the printing plug-in component architecture to help you add application-specific or printer-specific features to the Page Setup and Print dialogs, giving users instant access to their most frequently used printing preferences in one convenient location. You can also specify print options and settings in your printing application, such as setting the number of copies or allowing the user to print a document without opening it first, using the enhanced print Apple event.

If you are ready to begin learning about the APIs and tools available on Mac OS X for Printing, go to Getting Started With Printing, for a guided introduction and learning path.

For news, updates and links to other ADC content related to Printing on Mac OS X, return to the Printing topic page.

Posted: 2004-08-06