November 2007
Intermediate to advanced
320 pages
4h 55m
English
Unlike most other aspects of Mac OS X, printing is one of those functions that’s best dealt with on the graphical layer alone. There is theoretically a Unix interface to the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) architecture that underlies Mac OS X’s printing subsystem, but there’s hardly anything it allows the casual user to do that isn’t made apparent in the graphical layer, too—and usually in a more straightforward manner.
This isn’t to suggest that printing is always easy, or that there aren’t tricks to be learned, or things that can be done on the CLI level that are impossible in the GUI. As well as Mac OS X supports today’s printer lineup, it’s still one of the areas where the interface could stand some improvement. This ...