Dave Harris wrote:
In-Reply-To: <cqcjii$hs0$1@sea.gmane.org> dave@boost-consulting.com (David Abrahams) wrote (abridged):
That's okay for simple things, but for any serious printing work you need to know you're talking to a printer. For example, you may need to embed postscript in your output stream.
Not all printers support postscript, so you'd need to know not just that you were printing, but what kind of printer it was.
Not on the platforms I used; there was always a way to send the postscript in such a way as not to interfere with printers that didn't support it.
Although there probably needs to be some kind of abstraction-busting pass-through mechanism, I see it as the exception rather than the rule.
On the platforms where I did this, that mechanism was for the most part built into the OS. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com