Java Cookbook

Printing: Java 2

Problem

You need to generate hardcopy, and you’re using Java 2.

Solution

Use java.awt.print.PrinterJob.

Discussion

Like its predecessor, the Java 2 printing API makes you divide the data into pages. Again, you start by getting a PrinterJob object to control your printing. You’ll usually want to let the user pick a printer, which you do by calling the PrinterJob’s method printerDialog( ) . This pops up a platform-specific print chooser dialog, and if the user picks a printer, you get back a PrinterJob object (otherwise, again, you get back null). If you don’t call printerDialog( ) and there is a default printer, your job will be sent to that printer (if there isn’t a default printer, I don’t know what happens). Unlike the 1.1 API, however, Java is in charge of what to print and in what order, though your program is still responsible for pagination and drawing each page onto a print buffer. You need to provide an object that implements the Printable interface (see Section 8.8). In this example, we pass an anonymous inner class (see Section 8.7); this is not required but as usual makes the code more succinct by eliminating having to write another class in another file and by keeping the action and the result together. Java calls this object’s print( ) method once for each page the user has requested. This is more efficient than the 1.1 method, since if the user wants to print only page 57, you only get called once to print that page (in 1.1, you’d have to generate ...