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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Printer idle proc
Message-ID: <27335@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 4 Jan 89 10:58:02 GMT
References: <11605@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <271@berlin.acss.umn.edu> <27318@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <11623@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
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Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
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Kudos to Earle Horton for a fine posting on using asynchronous i/o. In
that posting, he talks about the printer idle proc. Inside Macintosh leads
one to believe that you can just disable the "page setup" and "print" menu
items, and call your main event loop to let the user do arbitrary things
while a document is printing.  I've tried this, and taken it out again. At
least with the imagewriter drivers of a year ago, the printer idle proc
doesn't get called often enough (about once a second) to give the user
interface enough time.  The user interface from inside printing feels so
sluggish that the idea wasn't worth it.  

It certainly is worthwhile to update the screen, and check the "Cancel"
button on a "Printing in Progress" dialog.  (Command-. isn't very friendly
for a novice user.)