[QUICKDRAW GX]
[Printing menu] Quickdraw GX represents a major change in the way that printing is done on the Macintosh. It offers a completely new way to print with an interface that is very intuitive. Before QuickDraw GX, you had to make a trip to the Chooser every time you changed output devices, so that the computer would know where to send the print job. With QuickDraw GX, you need only visit the Chooser ONCE for each printer you plan to use. Afterwards, changing printers from within an application that supports GX printing is as simple as clicking on a pop-up menu within that application's print dialog box.

[Printer icon]To use a printer, you first create a printer icon on the desktop. You do so by opening the Chooser and then, selecting a printer as usually would, whether it is connected directly, on a same network, or another part of the network in another zone, you click on Create. You may create as many desktop printers as you like (for each one you plan to connect to), however Apple doesn't recommend creating more than 5 desktop printers at a time. Each printer icon takes more memory, and this may cause problems if you are in a low memory situation.

With QuickDraw GX, you not only have network access to laser printers but to inkjet printers as well as most other output devices that support QuickDraw GX (just about everything as long as it has a GX-compatible driver). In the case of the Apple Telecom 2.0 software, you may even print to a fax that is not directly connected to your machine.

One of the nice things about using QuickDraw GX is the disappearance of the Print Monitor. Instead it is the printer icon which becomes the center for print-job management. The printer icon on the desktop indicates the status of the print-job (number of pages, font downloading, user, etc., just like the old Print Monitor used to). The printer icon also changes to reflect the status of the printer, by showing icons within the printer icon (paper symbol, alert symbol, etc.), like whether it is printing, whether it is out of paper, PostScript error, etc. It's a good idea to place your printer icon on the desktop in a way that it is easy to see it.

With QuickDraw GX installed, printing becomes much more flexible to manage. You can put a job on hold directly in the printer icon. If you double-click on an item in the print queue, it will open up into Simpletext. You can also stop, or put a job on hold by dragging the print job put of the printer queue onto the desktop. If you stopped a print job and wish to restart it, you can decide which page to begin printing from, so that you no longer have to print them all over again. You can also print documents by dragging a file overtop of the desktop Printer icon. You can also redirect a print job by dragging the file from one printer icon to another. Another way to print with QuickDraw GX is by dragging a document over the printer icon of your choice. GX will open the application that created the document and then print out the document.

In a non-GX aware application, like MacWrite Pro 1.5, the choice of a printer will automatically default to the printer designated as "Default Printer" on the desktop. If you have more than one printing device on your desktop, make sure to make the device you want to print to the "default" device before selecting "Print" in the application you want to print from. With GX-aware applications, even if you have a default printer, all other available devices (devices for which there are printer icons) are still available from the Print dialog box. Click on the pop-up menu to see the others.
You set preferences for printer icons by selecting them in the Finder. At that point, a new menu titled "Printing" will appear to the right of the "Special" menu. With the Printing menu, you can determine a default printer (if you have more than 1 on your desktop), determine the order of GX printing extensions, delay, restart or schedule a print-job and much more (depending on whether you have other printing extensions installed). You may create default settings for each particular printer, like the input trays, the quality of the print job, etc. Select each printer icon and then check the Printing menu for any menu options. These settings become the default setting for printing from that printer. You will print with these settings unless you override them in your application's Print Dialog box.

One of the new capabilities of QuickDraw GX is to create paper types. If you often use non-standard paper sizes, like for envelopes and personalized letterhead this can be quite useful. You create a paper type and define the physical size of the sheet of paper and the printable area on the page with PaperType Editor. After you define a custom paper type, you can use it in any application, whether or not the application supports QuickDraw GX. When using QuickDraw GX-compatible applications, GX offers the possibility of using multiple paper sizes in the same document. You can format the first page of the document ( or any page for that matter) in one size, the next can be another, and the third one may be completely different, and so on.

One of the options available in the Printing menu is Input Trays. If your printer has more than one input tray, you can tell GX what kind of paper is normally in that tray. (Incidentally, this becomes your default setting.) When you print to a GX-compatible application, and you have different paper sizes or types from within the same document, QuickDraw GX will take care of sending the right document to the right input tray. This is called paper-matching and for it to work right, you must remember to format your document before printing it (ie: the page setup command).

GX also changes the look of the Printing Dialog box from within each application that supports it: [Printing Dialog Box] On the left-hand side of the dialog box you'll see different icons (click on the "More" button if you don't see them). Each one refers to a printing extension, and each one allows you to set different possibilities for the print job, such as the time you would like it to print, paper matching, N-Up printing, etc. In this case, I have the Peirce Print Tools printing extension installed as well as the N-Up and EPS printing extensions included in the QuickDraw GX 1.1.2 package. Some GX-compatible applications also offer their own proprietary options from within the Print dialog box (ex : WordPerfect 3.1)

If you plan to use QuickDraw GX with a fax modem, you must make sure your Fax Driver is GX-compatible. When you install GX, older Chooser extensions no longer appear in the Chooser, and you can no longer use them. If you're fax driver is not GX-compatible, you can workaround this problem by turning GX off with GX Helper.

In addition to printing documents as you usually would, GX offers the possibility of creating portable documents, called PDDs or Portable Digital Documents. These are akin to Adobe's Acrobat "pdf" format. You create these with PDD Maker GX, a chooser extension that creates a desktop printer icon on the desktop. You "print" to the PDD maker just like you would a regular printer, but instead of printing out on paper, you generate a new file on the desktop, a PDD. With PDDs, you can give a document to a person and they can view the document without needing the original application nor the fonts that created it. PDDs can be viewed with SimpleText. You may also print the contents of a PDD should you wish to have it on paper -- just drag the PDD onto a desktop printer. Pixar's Typestry 2.1.1 allows you to import PDDs just as you would an EPS file, allowing you then to perform things like extrude and other special effects on the contents of the PDD file.

LaserWriter 8.3

If you have a problem or question that you don't see mentioned here, check out the Apple Technical Information Library. It gives specific info about some GX problems, explains the nature and the reason of them, and in some cases it mentions possible workarounds, etc. By using this form you may consult the ATIL directly from here:
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