Help needed in printing a JPanel in Swing..

Question

Hi,
I'm working on a Printing task using Swing. I'm trying to print a JPanel. All i'm doing is by creating a "java.awt.print.Book" object and adding (append) some content to it. And these pages are in the form of JPanel. I've created a separate class for this which extends the JPanel. I've overridden the print() method. I have tried many things that i found on the web and it simply doesn't work. At the end it just renders an empty page, when i try to print it. I'm just pasting a sample code of the my custom JPanel's print method here:
public int print(Graphics g, PageFormat pageformat, int pagenb)
    throws PrinterException {
//if(pagenb != this.pagenb) return Printable.NO_SUCH_PAGE;
Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D)g;
g2d.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING,
        RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);
g2d.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_FRACTIONALMETRICS,
        RenderingHints.VALUE_FRACTIONALMETRICS_ON);
g2d.setClip(0, 0, this.getWidth(), this.getHeight());
g2d.setColor(Color.BLACK);
//disable double buffering before printing
RepaintManager rp = RepaintManager.currentManager(this);
rp.setDoubleBufferingEnabled(false);
this.paint(g2d);
rp.setDoubleBufferingEnabled(true);
return Printable.PAGE_EXISTS;     
}Please help me where i'm going wrong. I'm just trying to print the JPanel with their contents.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi,
Try this
import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.awt.Graphics2D;
import java.awt.LayoutManager;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.print.PageFormat;
import java.awt.print.Printable;
import java.awt.print.PrinterException;
import java.awt.print.PrinterJob;
import javax.swing.AbstractAction;
import javax.swing.JColorChooser;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JToolBar;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;
public class PrintablePanel extends JPanel implements Printable {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
    public static void main(String[] args) {
     SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
         @Override
         public void run() {
          JFrame frame = new JFrame();
          frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
          final PrintablePanel target = new PrintablePanel(
               new BorderLayout());
          target.add(new JColorChooser());
          frame.add(target, BorderLayout.CENTER);
          JToolBar toolBar = new JToolBar();
          frame.add(toolBar, BorderLayout.PAGE_START);
          toolBar.add(new AbstractAction("Print") {
              private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
              @Override
              public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event) {
               PrinterJob printerJob = PrinterJob.getPrinterJob();
               printerJob.setPrintable(target);
               try {
                   printerJob.print();
               } catch (PrinterException e) {
                   e.printStackTrace();
          frame.pack();
          frame.setVisible(true);
    public PrintablePanel() {
     super();
    public PrintablePanel(LayoutManager layout) {
     super(layout);
    @Override
    public int print(Graphics g, PageFormat format, int page)
         throws PrinterException {
     if (page == 0) {
         Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) g;
         g2.translate(format.getImageableX(), format.getImageableY());
         print(g2);
         g2.translate(-format.getImageableX(), -format.getImageableY());
         return Printable.PAGE_EXISTS;
     } else {
         return Printable.NO_SUCH_PAGE;
}Piet
Edit: Sorry. Just now I see that you want to use the Swing print mechanism. But I guess the implementation of the Printable interface remains the same.
Edited by: pietblok on 14-nov-2008 17:23