Printing problems (printjob, 1.2.2, 1.3, WinNT and HP printers)

Question

We are experiencing a landry list of problems with java 1.2.2 and 1.3 when trying to print reasonably simple reports. I am just curious if anyone has encounterd problems like these, or if anyone has had any luck working around them. We would really like to release our software to production but I need to make sure that printing works well on all of the environments our client might run on. Here are the problems:
* Reporting was originaly done with a proprietary tool that limits us to using java.awt.PrintJob (new code is using PrinterJob... which is working okay...)
* When I try to use jre1.3 on my NT4.0 machine with a very simple program that gets a PrintJob it doesn't open the Print dialog and simply returns null (although it does work on my WinME laptop, and I cant find any bug reports about PrintJob dialogs on this site)
* When I try to use jre1.2 (which was our original target) there are problems with some printers running with some drivers (in house they are all various network HP printers). The printers will take 3 minutes a page while the same printer with an different driver (non-PS or PCL) will print very quickly.
Well I need some advice, are other people releasing software that doesn't work with all the possible ways that people could have their printers configured? Is there any hope of me finding a workaround... Is someone perhaps maintaining a list of drivers that work well with java? Or is there some empirical way of deciding (perhaps drivers that are not PS or PCL?)... Any responce would be very helpful...
--Erik Hadden                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Answer 1

Well, I decided to post my problem in more than one forum and got a response that may be what you are looking for. I haven't tried it yet and I'm not sure I understand it correctly, but I thought it may help you since it deals with printJob and supposedly works:
Other person wrote the following:
I have worked on printing but through Print Job.
i Print Multiple pages in landscsape.
in the printer Job you can print the static information
like if you implemented BOOk for mutiple pages it will only print the last information of your print function.
i found many problems when i was trying to implemnet printer Job
here is the complete code how can you print through print Job u can extends this to implement for multiple pages just use array of graphics.
Graphics Arrpage[];
Arrpage=new Graphics[count_pages];
PageAttributes pa=new PageAttributes();
pa.setOrientationRequested(PageAttributes.OrientationRequestedType.LANDSCAPE);
this.setCursor(Cursor.getPredefinedCursor(Cursor.WAIT_CURSOR));
Toolkit toolkit = this.getToolkit();
PrintJob job = toolkit.getPrintJob(new Frame(), user,null,pa);
if (job == null) return;
for(int j=0;j<count_pages;j++)
Arrpage[j] = job.getGraphics();
// Check the size of the scribble component and of the page.
Dimension size = this.getSize();
Dimension pagesize = job.getPageDimension();
// Center the output on the page. Otherwise it would be
// be scrunched up in the upper-left corner of the page.
Arrpage[j].translate((pagesize.width - size.width)/2, (pagesize.height - size.height)/2);
Arrpage[j].setColor(Color.white);
Arrpage[j].fillRect(0,0,pagesize.width,pagesize.height);
Arrpage[j].setClip(0, 0, size.width, size.height);
Arrpage[j].dispose(); // End the page--send it to the printer.
//System.out.println("Disposing "+j+" page");
}// end of for loop
//System.out.println("before ending the job");
job.end(); // End the print job.
Hope this will help u.