Jump To:
Technical Q&As: Device Drivers
The printing system in Mac OS X is based on the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS). Mac OS X printing supports a wide variety of PostScript and raster printers and offers advanced features such as network job spooling via the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), PDF and QuickDraw imaging, and high-quality color rendering. The printing system and the device driver subsystem also allow printer drivers and applications to present modular and extensible user interfaces. As a result, developers can take advantage of and extend Apple's interface rather than write extra code to override it.

View all Printing Technical Q&As.
Document Descriptions
On Off
Display

Sorted by
Title
Sort by
Date
Are the Name Registry device tree nodes unique? (HTML)
Deprecated - HW64: Discusses whether Name Registry nodes copied from the Open Firmware device tree are unique.
1999-10-11
Checking for the Printer Driver (HTML)
DV42: Describes a legacy Mac OS technique avoiding system hangs when using serial drivers on USB systems.
2000-06-19
Expansion ROM device properties (HTML) ()
HW50: Describes the Open Firmware properties that should be included in a boot device's expansion ROM.
1999-03-29
Generating an NMI Without a Programmer's Switch (HTML) ()
QA1264: Explains how to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) on CPUs without programmer's switches.
2004-04-26
Getting started with Forth (HTML) ()
HW53: Describes where FCode driver developers can get information about the Forth programming language.
1999-03-29
IODeviceTree & the IORegistry (HTML) ()
QA1120: Describes the IODeviceTree plane in the Mac OS X IORegistry.
2002-02-13
IOKit Framework Headers (HTML) ()
QA1107: Describes the differences between the headers in IOKit.framework and the I/O Kit headers in Kernel.framework.
2002-01-15
Is the Open Firmware device tree object oriented? (HTML)
HW80: Discusses the object-oriented attributes of the Open Firmware device tree.
1999-11-15
New PPD keywords available in Mac OS X version 10.3 (HTML)
QA1352: Describes the new PPD keywords available for CUPS filters in Mac OS X 10.3.
2004-05-26
The "packages" node in the device tree (HTML)
HW90: Describes the "packages" node in the Open Firmware device tree.
2000-09-05
Power Management; Policy Maker vs. Power Controller (HTML) ()
QA1121: Describes the differences between a Power Management Policy Maker and a Power Management Power Controller.
2002-02-13
Retain Counts of io_object_t Objects in IOKit.framework (HTML) ()
QA1195: Distinguishes between the retain counts of an I/O Kit kernel object and its io_object_t user space proxy.
2002-09-04
SCSIAction and IOSCSIUserClient on Mac OS X 10.2 (HTML) ()
QA1201: Describes migrating to a new API for SCSI Parallel devices starting with Mac OS X 10.2.
2002-09-13
Why does logging keep my Printer Module from working? (HTML) ()
Deprecated - QA1182: Describes some problems with standard printf logging in a Printer Module on Jaguar.
2002-11-06
Why don't all of my PDE localizations show up in all applications? (HTML) ()
QA1185: Explains why some PDE localizations might not appear in all applications.
2002-10-16