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: Unlike the Graphics objects passed as
arguments to a paint() method, this object does not
initially 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()