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Important: This document is part of the Legacy section of the ADC Reference Library. This information should not be used for new development.

Current information on this Reference Library topic can be found here:

QuickDraw GX and PDDs

Important for all Apple Printing and Graphics Developers:

The information in this Technical Q & A is still relevant up to and including Mac OS 7.6 with QuickDraw GX 1.1.5. Beginning with the release of Mac OS 8.0, however, Apple plans to deliver a system which incorporates QuickDraw GX graphics and typography only. QuickDraw GX printer drivers and GX printing extensions will not be supported in Mac OS 8.0 or in future Mac OS releases. Apple's goal is to simplify the user experience of printing by unifying the Macintosh graphic and printing architectures and standardizing on the classic Printing Manager.

For details on Apple's official announcement, refer to </dev/technotes/gxchange.html>

Q: We are developing a facility to view PDDs within an application and need help with some problems we're having. We are able to load pages and display them, but we also need to select text from the display and obtain the characters from the selection (the application associates the text with other information). We also need to frame the selection once it is associated with the other information, so the user can see what was associated.

We are using GXReadPrintFilePage to load and display the pages from the PDD, but we're not sure what we should use to hit-test the PDD and perform the selection.

A: GXReadPrintFilePage is the right call for what you are doing, as it gives you a GX picture shape which may contain many other GX shapes or other picture shapes. There are, however, many different approaches to hit-testing picture shapes, which makes it difficult to provide one piece of sample code or one specific answer. Depending on the needs of your application, you may want to hit-test text or layout shapes, and you may or may not want the user to be able to hit individual shapes which are members of picture shapes within the page picture shape.

Hit testing of pictures is documented in Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Graphics, starting on page 6-46. There is also a Hit Test sample on the GX SDK CD which shows options for hit testing various types of GX shapes.

[May 01 1995]

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