Thursday, October 02, 2008

News of the Not News: QuickDraw Printing is Dead

As I occasionally let on, my day job is the care and feeding of an ancient, semi-well known, Carbon application (and worse its Win32 doppleganger, and worse still its Win32 doppleganger's OLE interface). One "perk" is the occasional confrontation with the living dead. The dead in question is how we print. We print using a very old and elaborate system of QuickDraw calls spiked with embedded Postscript. This creates very nice output. On Postscript printers. From PowerPC Macs.
For Intel Macs, not so good. Why? Because there is no embedded Postscript in Quickdraw printing support for Intel Macs. It didn't make the cut of creaky technologies Apple bothered porting over during the Intel transition. So, yes, text and polygons look OK, if imprecisely positioned, and that's most of our output; but anything splined based is bad as there are no splines in QuickDraw only very big polygons.
So, users of ancient Carbon applications: check out the printing on your shiny new Intel box.