For a recent project written in Cocoa for Mac OS X, I found myself wanting to get the following set of information for a particular printer:

• A list of all available paper types
• Printable names for these paper types
• Page Sizes
• Imageable Margins for those same pages.

It turns out that there is no way to get this in Cocoa, and actually it’s not all that easy to find this information in Carbon either.

So, after some research and investimigation on the Intarwebs, as well as much combing through the various PM* header files (buried so deep in a directory on my machine that I had to save the directory name somewhere so I’d be able to find them again!), I’ve come up with the following method to do all the above.