Cocoa® Programming

Basic Printing

Printing is usually handled by NSView and its subclasses. The code executed to print a view is most often the same code used to draw the view onscreen. When a view receives the –print: message it displays a standard Cocoa Print panel. If the user clicks the Print panel’s Print or Preview buttons, the view’s –drawRect: method is called, much like when the view is requested to draw to the screen. The main difference is that when printing, the current graphics context is a printing context instead of a display context.

When implementing the –drawRect: method of an NSView subclass, it is possible to determine if the view is drawing to the screen or to another device, such as a printer, by calling [[NSGraphicsContext currentContext] ...