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Introduction to Printing

Contents:

Organization of This Document

This programming topic covers Cocoa’s printing architecture and explains how to support printing in a Cocoa application. Cocoa provides a set of classes that work together to make basic printing support easy. These behaviors can also be customized to provide the level of control your application needs in its printing behavior.

To understand how Cocoa printing works in the context of the Mac OS X printing system as a whole, you should first read Mac OS X Printing System Overview

Organization of This Document

This programming topic contains these articles:

• “Cocoa Printing Architecture” provides an overview of the classes involved in printing and how they work together.

• “Print Operations” describes NSPrintOperation, the class that controls a print job.

• “How Print Information Is Stored” describes NSPrintInfo, the class that stores information for print jobs.

• “Pagination” describes the options for placing an NSView object onto the printed page.

• “Creating a Print Job” describes how to create a print job and customize it to fit your needs.

• “Customizing a View’s Drawing for Printing” describes how a view can detect that it is drawing to a printer and modify its behavior accordingly.

• “Providing a Custom Pagination Scheme” shows an example of how a view can implement its own pagination scheme.

• “Using a Page Setup Panel” describes how to use and extend the Page Setup panel.

• “Using a Print Panel” describes how to use and extend the Print panel.

• “Printing Documents” describes how to make use of NSDocument’s printing features.

• “Accessing Printer Information” describes how to create printer objects and retrieve printer attributes.

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