Silent Printing / Print File Directly

[Jacob Anawalt]

Hello,

I am interested in having a Print Current Page button in a Print Preview dialog that prints the currently visible page without showing the Printer dialog, similar to the Print File Directly button on some word processors and spread sheet programs.

The Using Print Setup Dialogs page of the Printing Java Tutorial hints that this is possible, but it doesn't say how:

but in sometimes it's possible to print without showing any dialog at all. This type of printing is called silent printing. It may be useful in specific cases

This question sounded similar but I didn't know if I needed to use books and stuff. The simplest method without using a Pageable or Book class would be ideal as I've got a Printable that is aware of the current page and only prints that page as if it were the first and only one.

I've searched around and come up empty handed.

Thanks for your time,

[Jacob Anawalt]

I've stopped searching for silent printing and started searching for suppressing or hiding the Print Dialog and found answers like this that simply said not to call printDialog on the PrinterJob instance. That works but I don't know if I'm missing out on some important state set up as a side effect of calling that dialog. Is it really this simple?

public void printCurrentPage() {
    try {
        PrinterJob job = PrinterJob.getPrinterJob();
        job.defaultPage(pageFormat); // pageFormat provided in constructor
        job.setPrintable(new SinglePagePrintable(pageable,page)); // pageable created in constructor, page is current page
        job.print();
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, ex.toString(), "Error in Printing", JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE);
    }
}

...

class SinglePagePrintable implements Printable {
    final int page;
    final Pageable pages;
    SinglePagePrintable(Pageable pages, int page) {
        this.page = page;
        this.pages = pages;
    }

    public int print(Graphics g, PageFormat fmt, int index) {
        if (index > 0) {
            return Printable.NO_SUCH_PAGE;
        }
        try {
            return pages.getPrintable(page).print(g, fmt, n);
        } 
        catch (Exception ex) {
        }
        return Printable.PAGE_EXISTS;
    }
}