Technical Q&A QA1529

Gathering all PostScript Printer Descriptions (PPDs)

Q: I'm trying to gather all available PPDs on the users system but calling PMCopyAvailablePPDs with kAllPPDDomains returns an error. How can I get a list of all PPDs on the user's system?

A: PMCopyAvailablePPDs on Mac OS X 10.4 and earlier may incorrectly return no results given the kAllPPDDomains domain if any of the searched paths does not exist. Typically the missing directory is ~/Library/Printers/ as this folder was not created for user accounts created on older versions of Mac OS X.

A simple work around is to call PMCopyAvailablePPDs with specific domains instead of using the kAllPPDDomains constant. Listing 1 demonstrates this method.

Listing 1: A simple replacement for PMCopyAvailablePPDs

// Appends the discovered PPDs to the given mutable array, or does nothing on error.
void AppendPPDs(PMPPDDomain domain, CFMutableArrayRef destination)
{
  CFArrayRef temp = NULL;
  OSStatus err = PMCopyAvailablePPDs(domain, &temp);
  if((err == noErr) && (temp != NULL))
  {
    CFArrayAppendArray(destination, temp, CFRangeMake(0, CFArrayGetCount(temp)));
    CFRelease(temp);
  }
}

// Calls AppendPPDs using all PPD domains to gather all available PPDs
CFArrayRef MyPMCopyAllAvailablePPDs()
{
  CFMutableArrayRef ppds = CFArrayCreateMutable(kCFAllocatorDefault, 0, &kCFTypeArrayCallBacks);
  AppendPPDs(kSystemPPDDomain, ppds);
  AppendPPDs(kLocalPPDDomain, ppds);
  AppendPPDs(kNetworkPPDDomain, ppds);
  AppendPPDs(kUserPPDDomain, ppds);
  AppendPPDs(kCUPSPPDDomain, ppds);
  return ppds;
}

Document Revision History

Posted: 2007-07-18