Tutorials : Using FOP with Java - Part 2 :

In this solution, we are creating a Java Process by initializing the print queue. As Unix lp command supports piping of data, we are obtaining the outputStream of the print Process and setting that as the OutputStream for the FOP Driver instance. This means that FOP Driver will write the formatted output straight to the OutputStream of the printer process generated. A similar concept can be exploited in Windows based operating system as well if you want to. You also might have noticed that we are setting the Renderer to PostScript renderer just before we call the driver.run() method to let the Driver produce a Postscript output.

If you have a print queue "testQueue" set up in your environment, you will see a printed PostScript output to the printer configured for that queue.

What about PDF?

Well, in order to print a PDF document straight to the printer, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed in the machine and then you will have to invoke the print module of the Acrobat. This is straight forward and shouldn't be any trouble, but it's definitely worth trying. Find the Acrobat.exe files and you will see in the help section how to invoke Acrobat in the print mode. Create a Java process with that Acrobat .exe and pass the document to it. You can see that the drawback is that the machine must have Acrobat installed on it, hence, I prefer the other solutions. You can still store the documents in PDF, if you want to, but for a transparent print solution, I would recommend the Postscript solution mentioned in Listing 4.

Conclusion

In this article, we have understood that printing custom formatted documents such as PDF and Postscript needs specialized driver or application software. In case, where we must not have to store the document physically, we can print it in two different ways. One is using the intermediate XSL-FO document and AWT Renderer (Windows only) and the other is piping the formatted output directly to the printer (Unix). These two solutions are interchangeable in both the OS by providing correct Print Renderer or initiating a Java Print Process. Hope this article will give you a guideline to approach printing solutions using FOP.

Samudra Gupta has six years of Java related application development experience. He has been involved in various research based projects in Java including e-commerece based and application design and development projects. He is based in the United Kingdom. In his free time, he is a columnist in different Java Magazines and Journals and loves to play contract bridge.

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