Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!polya!kaufman
From: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Apple Printer Drivers (Was:Microsoft cuts corners, actually)
Message-ID: <3750@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 28 Aug 88 03:42:13 GMT
References: <77.23156CF6@mailcom.UUCP> <2943@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> <9942@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Reply-To: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 34

In article <9942@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> Peter.G.Merchant@dartmouth.edu (Peter Merchant) writes:

>What I'm seeing is a replay of the MS-DOS world.  Apple doesn't support
>other people's printers, the printer manufacturers have no wish to invest the
>time and effort figuring and refiguring how to support Apple computers, so
>developers (like Claris or Cricket) have to write support drivers for every
>known printer and ship them with their products.  So you buy MacDraw II and
>end up with (n) other disks to support other printers.

Well, actually, the Apple situation is better than that.  Printer device
manufacturers need to either supply their own driver, or contract with someone
else to write one for them.  If the driver is well written, almost all
applications can use them transparently from the chooser.  There are only a few
APPLICATIONS nowadays that do not follow the general form of the Apple
guidelines, so there is a good chance that a driver will work almost everywhere.
The problems usually occur when applications "know" that all printers print to
"pages", so, for instance, Microsoft Word asks whether you want letter or legal
size when a slide printer is selected (my, how often Microsoft is the example
we choose when we want to demonstrate how something should not be done).
MPW does not bring up a Job dialog, so some device parameters can NOT be
selected for some devices.  etc.

The gripe printer DRIVER writers have is not so much that the interface is not
documented (it is,... well enough), but that there has been no thought given to
printer devices that are not isomorphic to laserwriters and imagewriters.  AND,
it has so far been impossible to enforce APPLICATIONS adherance to the fine
points in the guidelines.  For instance, most applications do not look at the
"resolution" fields of the PrintRec, and those that do - do it differently for
each one.  I had one application developer tell me that "I" had to change
because he had already shipped 8000 copies of code that used fake Handles for
the PrintRec, thus causing a Handle operation to bomb in the driver.

(grumble, grumble,...)

Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu)