Java Print Service Frustrations

This is probably not the most exciting "toy" to play with for the holidays, but I wanted to explore some use-cases that involve printing through Java back-end services. Basically, in an enterprise environment you may run into requirements, where the documents you receive or generate also are required to be printed out for whatever reasons. In all honesty, I never had to deal with Java's print Apis and thus started from scratch.

It turns out, that there are 2 approaches (reminds me of the multitude of Date implementations...). One approach dates back to the 1990s and is called the Java 2 Print API and is tied more to User Interfaces (UI) triggering the printing process. With Java 1.4, the Java Print Service API (JPS) was introduced (JSR 6) which serves as a super-set of the the Java 2 Print Api.

The JPS Api is certainly workable but I ran into some serious trouble. For my initial use-case, I may receive simple text documents, e.g. XML that I want to send to a definable printer as plain text.

I was unable to get that to work on my Mac using Mac OS X 10.6.8. However, on my Windows JVM it worked flawlessly and my text files were printed out without any complaints. On my Mac, though, my little Java test application finishes without any errors but my printer queue states:

Error: pstopdffilter/pstocupsraster failed with err number -31000

• My Printer, which is a Brother HL-4070CDW
• The Mac JVM (Mine is: build 1.6.0_29-b11-402-10M3527)
• CUPS
• something else

• CUPS4J (http://www.cups4j.org/)
• jipsi (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jipsi/)

• JSPI (http://code.google.com/p/jspi)

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
 
import javax.print.Doc;
import javax.print.DocFlavor;
import javax.print.DocPrintJob;
import javax.print.PrintException;
import javax.print.PrintService;
import javax.print.PrintServiceLookup;
import javax.print.SimpleDoc;
import javax.print.attribute.HashPrintRequestAttributeSet;
import javax.print.attribute.PrintRequestAttributeSet;
import javax.print.attribute.standard.Copies;
import javax.print.attribute.standard.Sides;
 
public class PrintPS {
 
  public static void main(String args[]) throws FileNotFoundException, PrintException {
    FileInputStream textStream = new FileInputStream(args[0]);
    DocFlavor myFormat = DocFlavor.INPUT_STREAM.AUTOSENSE;
    Doc myDoc = new SimpleDoc(textStream, myFormat, null);
   
    PrintRequestAttributeSet aset = new HashPrintRequestAttributeSet();
   
    aset.add(new Copies(1));
    aset.add(Sides.ONE_SIDED);
   
    PrintService printService = PrintServiceLookup.lookupDefaultPrintService();
   
    System.out.println("Printing to default printer: " + printService.getName());
   
    DocPrintJob job = printService.createPrintJob();
    job.print(myDoc, aset);
 
  }
}

• RTEXT (http://rtext.fifesoft.com) 
• jEdit (http://www.jedit.org)

From http://hillert.blogspot.com/2011/12/java-print-service-frustrations.html