There is no reliable documented API for switching the default printer. There are workarounds which might or might not work in the future.
Briefly: there are CUPS techniques for setting the default printer. Under 10.4 these worked. Under 10.5 these work unless the user has chosen "Last Printer" in System preferences as the default printer, in which case the CUPS setting is ignored. So you have to check that preference, and potentially switch it temporarily. Hint: /usr/bin/defaults -currentHost read com.apple.print.PrintingPrefs UseLastPrinterAsCurrentPrinter There is no system facility for creating a printer which creates a PDF file. There is a download called CUPS-PDF which will do this. There are certain things about it that I don't like WRT file naming & placement. There are also some shell scripts floating around that accomplish the same thing. If you examine them, you find that they're basically just passing data through, since CUPS sends PDF to the driver. So what they really do is a batch of setup WRT to parsing command-line arguments, naming &creating & placing a file, and so on. The biggest problem with these is that they assume one instance, and if you try to create multiple printer instances, they all put files in the same place. So your custom printer would potentially interfere with ones set up by a user, rather than being truly dedicated to your use. It would be possible to modify one of these to name & place the PDF files as you prefer. I would have done that, but I hate bash scripting, so I wrote my own in Ruby. In or to print a file using another program, you want to look into AppleScript and possibly Launch Services. -- Scott Ribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.killerbytes.com/ (303) 722-0567 voice _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
