Mac OS® X Tiger™ Unleashed

The CUPS System Interface

Despite its ubiquitous presence, printing, as a process, is not a simple or conveniently packaged application. The interfaces need to be universally available, flexible, and extendable, without that flexibility jeopardizing the software that relies on it. It needs to seamlessly operate over group of devices that range in sophistication from knowing how find a particular point on a sheet of paper and place a black dot, to having complete operating systems and internal programming languages, and it needs to present all of these to the user with a cohesive, consistent interface. This calls for a considerable amount of programming glue, in the form of little programs that live between larger applications, and between parts ...