Mac OS X CUPS Postscript Plug-In Printer Driver Design

Printing within UNIX has historically been done using one of two printing systems - the Berkeley Line Printer Daemon ("LPD") and the AT&T Line Printer system. These printing systems were designed in the 70's for printing text to line printers; vendors have had to add varying levels of support for other types of printers.The Internet Printing Protoco(lIPP) defines extensions to the HyperText Transport Protocol 1.1 to provide support for remote printing services. CUPS uses IPP/1.1 to provide a complete, modern printing system for UNIX that can be extended to support new printers, devices, and protocols while providing compatibility with existing UNIX applications.The Mac OS X printing system provides a flexible and powerful new printing environment for Macintosh developers. Add support for CUPS in its architecture now. The architecture makes it much easier for application developers to support printing in their applications and for printer vendors to write printer drivers and extend printing dialogs.As printer vendors and application developers extend the printing capabilities of their hardware and software products, they need a way to extend the Mac OS X printing system to make new printing features available to their customers. To address this need, Mac OS X has introduced the printing plug-in-a component architecture. The printing dialog extension is a Mac OS X printing plug-in API that allows applications and printer modules to take advantage of advanced features in the printing system as they extend the printing dialogs. Like standard printer feature, then printing system will pass these options to CUPSAt first this article introduces the CPUS system, Mac OS X printing...