Java Reference
In-Depth Information
After you have a
PageFormat
object, you can modify the orientation of the page by calling its
setOri-
entation()
method as you know, the possible values for the argument being
LANDSCAPE
,
PORTRAIT
, or
REVERSE_LANDSCAPE
. The
PageFormat
class defines several methods to retrieve information about the pa-
per — you have seen that you can get the position and size of the printable area on the page, for instance, by
calling the
getImageableX()
,
getImageableY()
,
getImageableWidth()
, and
getImageableHeight()
methods. You also have
getWidth()
and
getHeight()
methods in the
PageFormat
class that return the
overall width and height of the page, respectively. These are all properties of the paper itself, which is rep-
resented by an object of the
java.awt.print.Paper
class that is associated with a
PageFormat
object. You
can also work with the
Paper
object for a
PageFormat
object directly.
Dealing with Paper
The
Paper
class encapsulates the size of the paper and the size and position of the printable area on the page.
The default constructor for the
Paper
class creates an American letter-sized sheet with one-inch margins
— the printable area being the area inside the margins. You can change the size of the paper by calling the
setSize()
method for the
Paper
object, as you see in a moment.
Rather than creating an independent
Paper
object, you would normally retrieve a reference to the
Paper
object for a
PageFormat
object by calling its
getPaper()
method. If you then want to change the size of
the paper, or the printable area — the page margins, in other words — you can call the
setSize()
or the
setImageableArea()
method for the
Paper
object. You can restore the paper details by passing an object of
type
Paper
back to the
PageFormat
object by calling its
setPaper()
method with a reference to the
Paper
object as the argument.
The
setSize()
method for a
Paper
object has two parameters of type
double
that specify the width and
height of the paper in units of 1/72 of an inch. If you use A4 paper, you could specify the size of the paper
for a
PageFormat
object with the following statements:
