Special printing modes

Filters can handle special printing modes.

Each filter you add to the filter table can be registered to handle special modes and other aspects of printing, such as:

• Special modes
• Printer type
• Character pitch
• Line pitch
• Page length
• Page width
• Pages to print
• Character set
• Form name
• Number of copies

A filter is required to handle the special modes and printing of specific pages; the print service provides a default handling for the rest. However, it may be more efficient to have a filter handle some of the rest, or it is possible that a filter has to know several of these aspects to fulfill its other roles properly. A filter may need to know, for example, the page size and the print spacing if it is going to break up the pages in a file to fit on printed pages. As another example, some printers can handle multiple copies more efficiently than the print service, so a filter that can control the printer can use the information about the number of copies to skip the print service default handling of multiple copies.