This section describes printing-related terminology and the classes defined by Common Printing.

A print device, referred to in this text as a printer, is any device capable of producing printed output. An instance of the CgPrinterScreen class represents a single printer.

A print job is a document stored within the computer that contains zero or more pages of output. Print jobs have platform- and device-specific attributes associated with them such as print resolution, form selection, special printer effects such as orientation and duplex printing, and so on. Common Printing encapsulates these attributes in the CgPrintJobAttributes class.

A CwPrinterShell provides job and page control methods, and processes printing events. The window associated with a CwPrinterShell represents the printable area on the physical page. Applications use Common Graphics operations to draw on this window.

Users can choose from available printers using a CwPrinterPrompter. Printer prompters also allow users to configure print job attributes.

A print server is an object that manages one or more printers and common resources such as printer fonts. In VA Smalltalk, a connection to a print server is represented by a CgDisplay. Each CgDisplay contains at least one CgPrinterScreen object and zero or more CgScreen objects.

The following diagram shows how the classes are related from the application's point of view.