In moving to Cocoa we’ve discovered that the Page Setup and Print dialogs are more modal than in Carbon.
Specifically, we have a global floating window that appears when users are printing our color profiling targets and (hopefully) helps them print correctly. The floating window contains an HTML viewer that shows hint pages from our website and allows the user to page forward through the hints.
In Carbon all is well. Under Cocoa the window never loads the content and if I jigger things to pre-load the content, it still is totally unresponsive to clicks.
Any ideas about how to get OS X to relinquish a little control?
I can see loading a separate helper app to show the hints but I’d rather avoid the extra app size and complexity
So your HTML Viewers help with Printer Setup?
yes. Or at least, they used to
I have a very similar issue- HTML viewer simply wont change page in code unless it gets reshown/has the focus.
This is ugly when its on a different screen, or initially slightly behind a document window.
The helper is probably the way. It is not that difficult to do.
Is there a specific part of the OS dialog that you believe your users would not understand?
The dialog is literally everywhere in macOS.
In my opinion you shouldn’t need the helper, and might as well scrap it.
Sorry that’s not any help.
[quote=305792:@Tim Parnell]Is there a specific part of the OS dialog that you believe your users would not understand?
The dialog is literally everywhere in macOS.
In my opinion you shouldn’t need the helper, and might as well scrap it.
Sorry that’s not any help.
:/[/quote]
It’s a good question, I’ll answer your question with a question:
Do you find it clear how to print a color image so that ICC profiles are not applied? (by either the OS or the driver / printer)
This is an essential part of printing a color profiling target properly so we can build ICC profiles for customers.
I don’t know much about ICC, and I’ll admit it’s hard to figure out; but I did find color matching options! 
Do you display the printer setup dialog as a sheet or a floating dialog? A sheet is supposed to only be modal to the window you attach it to, so perhaps you can do some workaround where you pop the HTML Viewer as a floating dialog before attaching printer setup as a sheet to a different window? I can’t say I know the Xojo sheet behavior off the top of my head, so this idea is untested.
that’s an interesting suggestion Tim. I forgot about displaying printer dialogs as sheets. It might make a difference.
I’ll give it a try