Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-ncis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!purdue!bu-cs!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu!earleh
From: earleh@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Earle R. Horton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Printer idle proc
Message-ID: <11659@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 6 Jan 89 06:19:18 GMT
References: <11605@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <271@berlin.acss.umn.edu> <27318@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <11623@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <27335@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: earleh@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Earle R. Horton)
Organization: Thayer School of Engineering
Lines: 33

In article <27335@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP 
	(David Phillip Oster) writes:
>... 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.
>
     I suppose I should have pointed out that exactly how much time
you get back here is dependent on the printer driver, the Style
options, and the Job options.  It all depends on how much CPU time and
how much I/O time is required by the chosen method.  If you choose
"Tall Adjusted" from the Style dialog and "Faster" from the Job
dialog, then you get back enough time to allow the user to do plenty
of things.  This is true for the ImageWriter driver, anyway.

     Assuming that the user interface while running from a pIdleProc
is too sluggish is not valid in all cases.  There is also no reliable
means of predicting how sluggish it will be with any given printing
job, either, since that requires device-dependent information.

     The fact is that there do exist printer files which give back
significant computation time to an application when using some
printing styles/methods.  If you allow for the possibility that one of
these may be in use while you print, then you get a more user-friendly
printing interface, at least some of the time, and it is worth it.

Earle R. Horton. 23 Fletcher Circle, Hanover, NH 03755
(603) 643-4109
Graduate student.