Core Capabilities

The JPDF provides you with the capability to add comprehensive printing functionality to your Java application/applet. The overall objective of the JPDF is to allow you to implement the printing requirements of your application with a minimum amount of effort.

Preview/Print Swing Components

The JPDF provides the ability to preview and print the GUI components that are part of Java Swing:

The Swing components that can be printed include JTable, JTree, JTextPane, JTextArea, JEditorPane, and JPanel.
Specialized Page Setup dialogs are provided for each type of component. For example, the Page Setup dialog for Tables allows you to specify whether the table should be printed with grid lines, with the column headers repeated on every page, with the selected table cells highlighted, and so on.
Complex documents, containing a sequence of Swing components arranged back-to-back, can be composed and printed. Any sequence of JTable, JTree, JTextPane, JTextArea, JEditorPane, and JPanel can be printed in this manner.

Report Generation

The JPDF provides a report generation capability which allows you to compose, preview, and print reports containing data obtained from external sources (e.g. databases and files).

Reports can contain tabular, textual, and other types of material (e.g. mailing labels).
Reports can contain computed statistcs (e.g. table column totals) in addition to the raw data.
Reports are composed programatically – giving you full control over all aspecs of layout and formatting.

Page-Setup, Preview, and Print Dialogs

The JPDF provides a variety of dialogs which can be incorporated out-of-the box (i.e. without modification) into your application. Three types of dialogs are provided:

Setup Dialogs allow the user to establish the settings that will be used for printing (but not to actually print). These dialogs allow the user to examine and update the print-attributes which specify various print-rendering options.
Preview Dialogs allow the user to view an on-screen representation of how the material to be printed will appear on paper.
Print Dialogs allow the user to print some material by submitting a Print Job to the printer. These dialogs allow the user to select the printer to be used, and to specify various options (e.g. the range of pages to be printed).

An efficient component-assembly framework can be utilized to create custom print dialogs if the provided ones do not meet your requirements.

Custom Print Attributes

The JPDF provides a large number of Print Attributes in addition to those provided in the JRE. These Custom Print Attributes allow you to specify:

the content of Page Headers/Footers,
the Alignment/Positioning/Scaling of the material to be printed,
the framing of the page and/or printed material, and
many options specific to the type of material being printed (for example, whether a table should be printed with grid lines).

Print Job Management

The JPDF provides a Print Job management facility. All Print Jobs are executed on a background thread. This allows the end-user to continue working while the Print Job is being processed in the background. The status of the Print Job can be monitored while it is executing. The end-user can optionally be informed of the Job's progress as each page is printed or when the Job has completed. You can optionally allow the end-user to cancel the Print Job before it has completed.

Print Job output can be directed to a Printer File, Image Files (JPEG or PNG), or an Adobe Acrobat® PDF File (requires the Ghostscript PDF interpreter).

Localization

The JPDF provides localization capabilities. All of the text displayed in the JPDF dialogs comes from property files (these are text files that you can edit). A separate property file is provided for each supported language (currently

English,

French,

German,

Italian,

Polish and

Spanish). Units of measure used in the dialogs can be expressed as Inches or Millimeters -- as appropriate for the chosen locale or independent of the locale.

Please press the Next Button (

) in the tool bar above to proceed to the next page.