The Printable interface is implemented
by the print methods of the current
page painter, which is called by the printing
system to render a page. When building a
{@link Pageable}, pairs of {@link PageFormat}
instances and instances that implement
this interface are used to describe each page. The
instance implementing Printable is called to
print the page's graphics.
A Printable(..) may be set on a PrinterJob.
When the client subsequently initiates printing by calling
PrinterJob.print(..) control
is handed to the printing system until all pages have been printed.
It does this by calling Printable.print(..) until
all pages in the document have been printed.
In using the Printable interface the printing
commits to image the contents of a page whenever
requested by the printing system.
The parameters to Printable.print(..) include a
PageFormat which describes the printable area of
the page, needed for calculating the contents that will fit the
page, and the page index, which specifies the zero-based print
stream index of the requested page.
For correct printing behaviour, the following points should be
observed:
- The printing system may request a page index more than once.
On each occasion equal PageFormat parameters will be supplied.
- The printing system will call
Printable.print(..)
with page indexes which increase monotonically, although as noted above,
the Printable should expect multiple calls for a page index
and that page indexes may be skipped, when page ranges are specified
by the client, or by a user through a print dialog.
- If multiple collated copies of a document are requested, and the
printer cannot natively support this, then the document may be imaged
multiple times. Printing will start each copy from the lowest print
stream page index page.
- With the exception of re-imaging an entire document for multiple
collated copies, the increasing page index order means that when
page N is requested if a client needs to calculate page break position,
it may safely discard any state related to pages < N, and make current
that for page N. "State" usually is just the calculated position in the
document that corresponds to the start of the page.
- When called by the printing system the
Printable must
inspect and honour the supplied PageFormat parameter as well as the
page index.
This is key to correct printing behaviour, and it has the
implication that the client has the responsibility of tracking
what content belongs on the specified page.
- When the
Printable is obtained from a client-supplied
Pageable then the client may provide different PageFormats
for each page index. Calculations of page breaks must account for this.
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