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Printing a Collection of Pages

When you need more control over the individual pages in a print job, you can use a pageable job instead of a printable job. The simplest way to manage a pageable job is to use the Book class, which represents a collection of pages.

Example: SimpleBook

The SimpleBook program uses a Book to manage two page painters: PaintCover is used for the cover page, and PaintContent is used for the content page. The cover page is printed in landscape mode, whereas the content page is printed in portrait mode.

Once the Book is created, pages are added to it with the append method. When you add a page to a Book, you need to specify the Printable and PageFormat to use for that page.

// In the program's job control code...
// Get a PrinterJob
PrinterJob job = PrinterJob.getPrinterJob();

// Create a landscape page format
PageFormat landscape = job.defaultPage();
landscape.setOrientation(PageFormat.LANDSCAPE);

// Set up a book
Book bk = new Book();
bk.append(new PaintCover(), job.defaultPage());
bk.append(new PaintContent(), landscape);

// Pass the book to the PrinterJob
job.setPageable(bk);

The setPageable method is called on the PrinterJob to tell the printing system to use the Book to locate the appropriate rendering code.

You can find the full program in SimpleBook.java.

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