Methods of the java.awt.PrintJob class

For example:

PrintJob pj = 
 Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getPrintJob(new Frame(), 
 "Hello World", null);
This returns a platform specific subclass of the PrintJob class. The first thing you'll want to do with this object is determine the characteristics of the printer. There are three methods for this:

 public abstract int getPageResolution()
 public abstract Dimension getPageDimension()
 public abstract boolean lastPageFirst()
The getPageResolution() method returns the number of dots per inch of thee printer, typically 300 or 600 for most laser printers. getPageDimension() returns a java.awt.Dimension object giving the size of the printable area of the page in pixels (not inches!). For example, the following code fragment prints the total number of pixels on the page:

  PrintJob pj = Toolkit.getPrintJob();
  int resolution = pj.getPageResolution();
  Dimension d = pg.getPageDimension();
  System.out.println("There are " + (resolution * d.width * d.height) 
   + " pixels on a page.");
Finally lastPageFirst() returns true if the last page will be printed first, false otherwise.

You use this information to prepare your image to be drawn on the page. depending on the size of the page and the type of the image, you may need to spilt it across multiple pages. Sometimes it's easier to just draw the entire image on each page, but use clipRect() to set the fraction of the image to actually be drawn.

The drawing itself is done with a java.awt.Graphics object like the one you use in the paint() method of an applet. This is returned by getGraphics(), and has all the usual method of the Graphics class, drawLine(), drawString(), and so on. 

 public abstract Graphics getGraphics()
There's one important caveat: Unilke the Graphics objects passed as arguments to a paint() method, this object does not intially have a font set. You'll generally want to set its font before using it like this:

  Font courier = new Font("Courier", Font.PLAIN, 12);
  g.setFont(courier);
When you're done with a PrintJob call its end() method to perform any necessary flushing and clean up. 

 public abstract void end()
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Last Modified May 19, 1999
Copyright 1997, 1999 Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu