Multi-page printing

[VitriolUK]

I've been driving myself nuts with this one over the past week. I managed to handle printing a single page of text or images without too many problems, but multi-page printing is driving me nuts. The code I have at the moment is:

class PrintObject implements Printable
{
public String mText = "Error - No Text Found";
public boolean finish;

public int print (Graphics g, PageFormat format, int pageIndex)
{
boolean tempbo = finish;
finish = false;
AttributedString mStyledText = new AttributedString(
mText);

Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D) g;

g2d.translate(format.getImageableX(), format.getImageableY());

g2d.setPaint(Color.black);

Point2D.Float pen = new Point2D.Float();
AttributedCharacterIterator charIterator = mStyledText.getIterator();
LineBreakMeasurer measurer = new LineBreakMeasurer(charIterator,
g2d.getFontRenderContext());
float wrappingWidth = (float) format.getImageableWidth();
int nextbreak = 0, where = 0;
boolean breaker, endbreak;

while ( (measurer.getPosition() < charIterator.getEndIndex()) && (!finish)) {

where = measurer.getPosition();
breaker = false;
endbreak = false;
nextbreak = 1;
while (!breaker) {
if (where + nextbreak >= charIterator.getEndIndex() - 1) {
breaker = true;
endbreak = true;
}
if (mText.charAt(where + nextbreak) == '\r') breaker = true;
else nextbreak++;
}

TextLayout layout;
if (endbreak) layout = measurer.nextLayout(wrappingWidth);
else layout = measurer.nextLayout(wrappingWidth, nextbreak + where, false);
pen.y += layout.getAscent();
float dx = layout.isLeftToRight() ? 0 :
(wrappingWidth - layout.getAdvance()); //cond ? true : false

layout.draw(g2d, pen.x + dx, pen.y);
pen.y += layout.getDescent() + layout.getLeading();
if ( (pen.y + layout.getAscent()+layout.getDescent()) >
(format.getImageableHeight() + format.getImageableY())) finish = true;
}

if (finish){
mText = mText.substring(where + nextbreak);
return PAGE_EXISTS;
}
else {
if (!tempbo) return NO_SUCH_PAGE;
else return PAGE_EXISTS;
}

}

}

Unfortunately, this seems to print only half of the pages. I've tried all sorts of stuff, including adding another class boolean to ensure each page is printed twice, but when I do that it won't stop printing (even though NO_SUCH_PAGE is being returned in the correct location).

Can anyone spot where I've gone wrong, or else point out a nice simple class or class library that'll handle printing a long string which takes up several pages of text. I've downloaded JFreeReport but it's much bulkier and has way more functionality than I need.

Oh, the class that calls that one is:


public class PrintWords{

private String mText = "Error - No Text Found";
private boolean finish;
private boolean second;

public PrintWords(String input) {
mText = input;
finish = true;
}

public void doprint(String input) {

PrinterJob job = PrinterJob.getPrinterJob();

PrintObject myPrinter = new PrintObject();
myPrinter.mText=mText;
myPrinter.finish=finish;

job.setPrintable(myPrinter);

if (job.printDialog())
{
try { job.print(); }
catch (PrinterException e) { System.out.println(e); }
}

}

}

Thanks all.

 

[idarke]

You have a bizarre little problem there. I tried your code out and determined that it always skipped the first and last pages. I tinkered with it for hours and was unable to change that behaviour even slightly.

I still plan to work on it, but in the meantime I've had some success with JPrint at

http://www.activetree.com/index.html

It's bulky too, but you can ignore most of the bulk if you want to.

 

[VitriolUK]

Thanks for the link; I wouldn't worry too much about wasting time trying to figure it out; I'll try rewriting from scratch following a tutorial and see if it works better. In the mean time I wrote a class to print just one page, and then another which takes the string and splits it into chunks that'll fit on a page and then calls the print class multiple times. Which isn't ideal since you get the print dialog a bunch of times and each page goes to the print spool seperately, but will do for the moment.

 

[idarke]

One thing I found was that if you create a Pageable object that passes back the number of pages to print, the whole thing works a lot faster.

Since the Pageable also returns the Printable object used to render each page, you might consider incorporating this into your final solution.

Good luck!