Java Text Printing

Question

Hi Guys,
I am trying to print a text file in a JTextArea. I tried doing it in many ways...
1) Implementing Printable interface and calling printAll of the JTextArea - It only prints the first page. Not good for me.
2) Implementing Printable interface and drawing the text on the Graphics object using drawString. - Printing is good but it is very slow and spool size is very large. it takes around 2 mins to print a page. I have lots of reports going to tens of pages. They take a lot of time. Not good for me.
3) Implementing Printable interface and drawing the text on a DoubleBufferImage. Printing is fast but the image is not good. Not good for me.
All these things didnt work for me. Either they were slow using lot of spool memory or the resolution was not good.
So I started writing into the port of the printer (port - LPT) and it was very fast. To format the file, I used PCL and everything works fine now. I dont know if this is a good solution or if there are any other ways. Can somebody shed some light on this.
I am using Java 1.3.
-Vijay

Answer 1

Hi,
Implements the Printable like this... It works for me...
public int print(Graphics g, PageFormat pf, int pageIndex) throws PrinterException
Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g;
g2.setColor(Color.black);
Dimension dimen = this.getSize();
double panelW = dimen.width;
double panelH = dimen.height;
double pageH = pf.getImageableHeight();
double pageW = pf.getImageableWidth();
double scale = pageW/panelW;
int numPage = (int)Math.ceil(scale * panelH / pageH);
if(pageIndex >= numPage) return Printable.NO_SUCH_PAGE;
g2.translate(pf.getImageableX(), pf.getImageableY());
g2.translate(0f, -pageIndex*pageH);
g2.scale(scale, scale);
this.paint(g2);
return Printable.PAGE_EXISTS;
}