Inside Macintosh: Advanced Color Imaging on the Mac OS /

Preface - About This Book

This electronic book, Advanced Color Imaging on the Mac OS, and its companion, Advanced Color Imaging Reference, describe the following collections of system software routines:

• the Palette Manager
• the Color Picker Manager, version 2.0
• the ColorSync Manager, version 2.1
• the Color Manager

The chapters in this book describe how to use these managers to enhance your application's color capabilities. To implement core graphics capabilities, your application should use QuickDraw or QuickDraw GX. The book Inside Macintosh: Imaging With QuickDraw describes how your application can use QuickDraw to create and display Macintosh graphics, and how to use the Printing Manager to print the images created with QuickDraw. The Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX suite of books describes the QuickDraw GX object-based graphics programming environment for creating, displaying, and printing graphics.

To provide more sophisticated color support on indexed graphics devices in QuickDraw environments, your application can use the Palette Manager. The Palette Manager allows your application to specify sets of colors that it needs on a window-by-window basis. An indexed device supporting a byte for each pixel allows 256 colors to be displayed. On a video device that uses a variable color lookup table, your application can use the Palette Manager to display a different palette with each window. This feature allows you to provide effective color support despite the limited number of colors in each palette.

To solicit color choices from users, your application can use the Color Picker Manager. Whether your application uses QuickDraw or QuickDraw GX, the Color Picker Manager provides your application with a standard dialog box for soliciting a color choice from users.

To match colors between screens and input and output devices such as scanners and printers, Macintosh system software provides a set of routines and algorithms called the ColorSync Manager. Developers writing device drivers use the ColorSync Manager to support color matching between devices. Application developers use the ColorSync Manager to communicate with drivers and to present users with color-matching information, such as a device's color capabilities.

QuickDraw GX and the Color Picker Manager automatically use the ColorSync Manager to perform color matching. Unless your application is using one of these two graphics managers, it must explicitly call the functions of the ColorSync Manager to use its color-matching capabilities.

The Color Manager assists Color QuickDraw in mapping your application's color requests to the actual colors available. Most applications never need to call the Color Manager directly.

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Preface Contents

Documents Included With This Book

A Note on ColorSync Versions

Backward Compatibility

Conventions Used in This Book

Special Fonts

Types of Notes

Development Environment

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