On 1/28/15 10:23 PM, Tom Eugelink wrote:
Ok, I see my question is not quite clear: I'm not looking for how to
print, I am trying to figure out how to properly implement printing on
a custom control, more specifically JFxtras' Agenda. Agenda has the
same problem as the more recognizable usecase of a spreadsheet: it
uses a scrollpane in its skin, so when taking a screenshot this
scrollpane limits what is captured, but when printing -like a
spreadsheet- I need all the data.
So first I was trying to grasp how printing in JavaFX works
conceptually, but from what I'm decuding so far this is very limited
and basically no more that screen capturing. Correct?
You can draw anything you like to the printer. It doesn't have to ever
be displayed on the screen. But any time you (eg) go beyond primitives
where you can define and control the extent and go into the realm
of content driven nodes, you need to deal with pagination and at
that point you need to go back to the data you want to display and
format it for the printer. Printing the list of items in a ComboBox is
very different than printing/draw the ComboBox control.
If the author of a control provides a means to do that for you
(like HtmlEditor does) then it becomes easy. If they don't you'll need
to do it yourself.
If you create an Agenda that is never displayed but has the same
data and set its size so that it can display all the data, I expect
it should be possible to scale it so that it fits on one page like
the example you referenced but once you have 500 items in
your agenda, someone is going to have to handle the magic
that splits that across pages and there's no way the core printing API
could know how to do that for a control. All it sees are Nodes ..
-phil.
Tom
On 29-1-2015 05:53, Phil Race wrote:
That example is not great as it picked the one node type that knows
how to do
something special with printing and completely overlooks it.
The print(Node) method it provides can print any node type but it is
scaling
it to fit on a single side of paper. That's not ideal for a huge
spreadsheet/table
as you won't be able to read the output without a microscope.
I was pointing to the method on webengine that you mention last below
as the one you should use and the example does not use that anywhere.
To get proper pagination you need to explicitly call the
WebEngine.print(PrinterJob) method
-phil.
On 1/27/15 10:22 PM, Tom Eugelink wrote:
Ok, so looking at some examples like
http://java.dzone.com/articles/introduction-example-javafx-8
where PrintJob is let lose on a node, JavaFX's PrintJob will either
use the screen rendering or -if present- call: public void
print(PrinterJob job)
Correct?
Tom
On 28-1-2015 02:43, Phil Race wrote:
On 1/27/15 4:08 PM, Tom Eugelink wrote:
Do I need to do something special to support printing of custom
controls? The use case is that on screen a spreadsheet can be
shown in a scrollpane, but when printing the whole spreadsheet
should be printed.
Being a 'custom' control doesn't really make a difference here.
The same would apply if you wanted to print one of the built-in
controls
that is in a scroll pane or otherwise not likely to fit on a page.
Spreadsheets, like TableView, TextArea and the like will need
to have their data laid out for the printer by the application.
In practice this means starting with the data contained in
the spreadsheet and iterating over it printing as much as fits
on each page in what ever way you want.
I am sure that something that can handle this this would
make a nice add-on to to the core API but it was not something
that was considered appropriate to be part of FX core.
We expected reporting packages to pop up from 3rd parties
The exception to this is HtmlEditor / WebEngine where you
cannot reasonably expect the application or such a package
to know how to properly print the data (HTML and other web content)
Hence that has a method to print its content to a PrinterJob
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/javafx/api/javafx/scene/web/WebEngine.html#print-javafx.print.PrinterJob-
So one possibility for you is to throw your data into HTML table
syntax, load
it into a web node and print that.
-phil.
