Macintosh Bible, 8th Edition, The

What Happens When You Hit Print (BW)

Hitting the Print button starts a long chain of events that should (in principle, at least) get your document data out of your Mac and down to a printer. The printer will then pound, blast, bake, or spray the correct dots onto the page, and it'll look great.

But first your application has to gather together the data you've selected to print and then send it to the Mac operating system, which acts as a sort of printing service for all the applications you use.

Let 'Er RIP

But first, back to dots. Somewhere along the line in the printing process, the computer data describing the text and graphics you want to print has to get converted into dots, since most of what you print doesn't start out that way. For example, ...