Use paint() for print()????

Question

I see many print examples out there on the web and such. I am wondering why for the print function, they just don't call paint() on the component they want to print.
For example, if you have a JTextArea and you want to print it, make the object implementint the Printable interface and have the print function just invoke paint() on that text area for each page. I did this, and don't see any problems. It was much quicker than formatting the text myself. I just modify the graphics object and pass it to the paint function and voila, it looks exactly like the JTextArea if the JTextArea were as big as the piece of paper. I am just wondering why the examples out there don't do it this way. Is there some problem I am going to run into? I have run into no problems so far and printing works fine.
thanks for any help/suggestions.
dean

Answer 1

Indeed, that's the default for Swing components. Quoting from javax/swing/JComponent.java in src.jar:
    public void print(Graphics g) {
     setFlag(IS_PRINTING, true);
     try {
         paint(g);
     finally {
         setFlag(IS_PRINTING, false);
    }I'll note two things .. one is the AWT heavyweight components cannot be printed this way. Second, what if you want the printed representation different than the screen representation? For example, you want different font characteristics on screen than on paper because printers have much higher resolution (dpi) than screens.
- David