When I started Polaschek Computing, I wrote a few essays on the state of Macintosh printing. Some of these are fairly dated since Apple has completed the transition to Mac OS X, but they’re interesting from a historical perspective.
- Application Compatibility in printer drivers was a complete nightmare in classic Mac OS printer drivers. Since printer drivers were not very well documented, applications tended to implement things via trial and error, which meant that when you were writing a new driver, you would have to be somewhat bug-compatible with earlier printer drivers.
- Non-Linear Text Scaling was an issue you had to consider when printing, since 48 point text would not take up four times the space of 12 point text. I was often surprised that applications and printer drivers got this right as often as they did.
- A description of Text (and bitmap) Smoothing in the LaserWriter, and what “Precision Bitmap Alignment” meant in the LaserWriter driver, and why you probably don’t want to try and replicate this behavior precisely.