Re: How to persist print dialog settings?
G.W. Lucas wrote:
On Dec 8, 4:05 pm, "Knute Johnson" <knute.johnson@1:261/38.remove-n3i-
this> wrote:
You need a PageFormat to print. Keep the same PageFormat for the life of the
program. When you exit, save the orientation state and restore that when you
restart the program.
Thanks. I've looked at PageFormat and I'm afraid it's not going to
solve my problem. Here's the thing... the nature of my graphics is
that most of the time they ought to be printed with a landscape
orientation. The default paper orientation for almost every
application in the known universe is, of course, portrait. With that
in mind, the ideal solution would be for the application would let the
user pick an orientation the first time he prints and then present him
with that same value every time after that. As a compromise solution,
it would probably be okay if the Java print dialog could persist the
settings from invocation to invocation within the same run of the
application, but Java doesn't do that. So right now, I am stuck with
making the user pick the paper orientation every time they print.
They're going to hate that.
You are not paying attention. You can set the orientation in the
PageFormat object anytime you want. This will present your selected
orientation in the print dialog. Do it at the beginning, have the user
select it the first time, it doesn't matter. Keep the same PageFormat
object and the orientation (and all of the other fields too) will persist.
There are two printDialog methods. One takes no arguments and one
takes a PrintRequestAttributeSet. In theory the attribute set can be
used as a way of persisting settings. The problem is that when I pass
one in, Java gives me a different dialog (one which I consider pretty
hokey looking and, worse, doesn't allow the user to access all the
printer Properties).
So don't use that, do what I suggested above.
Failing a better solution, I'm VERY RELUCTANTLY going to call this a
Java bug and do a work around. When you set up a Java PrinterJob, you
register an instance of the Printable interface which implements a
method called print() which is where your code is supposed to do all
its work. The print() method does get a PageFormat object. I can have
the program look at the page dimensions and orientation and
automatically pick an orientation for the user. This approach would
commit the minor affront of ignoring whatever the user selected for
his orientation, but I hope that most of the time he won't care.
See previous comment.
I've got running code with this in it. It works fine.
--
Knute Johnson
email s/nospam/knute2009/
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