I have stumbled upon this posting of the so called PrintJob and have to say I am kind of worried. what you guys are saying are true workarounds, however, from my perspective they are all HACKS.

One thing is clear. Adobe is using their monopoly power to prevent us from being able to print, and is forcing us to buy flashpaper which I will not do. So, this weekend I am writing a letter to the attorney general on this issue. How many of us flash developers would be interested in a class action lawsuit ? This is fucked up. Email me at thartist026@hotmail.com

I’m having issues with using printjob using addpages. I’ve tried creating the pages using createEmptyMovieClip and drawing a bitmap onto it using a repeat loop first then using setInterval to start the printjob and addpages afterwards but I keep getting pages printing black.

The funny thing is that on a Mac, if you use print preview, it works but if you print direct, I get these black pages printed.

Any suggestions are greatly welcome.

Thanks / RP

I was thinking one work around might be to create an autosized Textfield the entire length of the text off stage. Then print the page rects until you have reached the height of that clip…

var printClip = mc.attachMovie(”com.magic.views.PrintClip”, “printClip” pageCount, pageCount);
printClip.init(p_text);
var yOffSet:Number = 0;

//printClip.scrollRect = _scrollMask;
var my_pj:PrintJob = new PrintJob();

if (my_pj.start())
{

while(yOffSet 0){
my_pj.send();
}
delete my_pj;

}

I’m still tweaking with it to make sure text doesn’t get cut off from page to page, but it’s much faster than some of the alternative solutions Mark ;)

The trick is to prepare your pages *before* you start the PrintJob.

Also: I’ve held off on a new post because I uncovered at least one test case wherein my TextAreaDecorator fails. In fact, it’s not so much the TextAreaDecorator failing but the TextArea absolutely refusing to initialize correctly regardless of how long you wait before invalidating it!

The search for the perfect solution continues…

Thanks, man! Your application looks very sleek by the way.

The way I designed the print solution, it doesn’t time out: The trick is to use intervals instead of a regular loop. This complicates your implementation, of course, but, since it spans multiple frames, it doesn’t ever timeout.

Hope that helps and best of luck with your app!

IT WORKS!!!

The darn thing works!

(I have the FlashPaper to prove it!)

Expect another post after I’m off this train and have had a bite to eat for dinner!

Thank you all again for your help!

And when you’ll be able to print several pages (like a multiple page with a text scrolling…) you will be facing a real, big, and horrible bug: to print multiple pages, you have to write a function (of course). But, but, the PrintJob is calling another system object: the print spooler. tadaaaaa: flash is not really ‘pausing’ your function, so after few seconds, you’ll have a wonderfull ‘Flash run slowly blabla blabla’ error message!

Actually, the only way to ‘fix’ that is to use ASV or Flasm to put the scriptlimit tag to 60 or 120 seconds (and enjoy the debugging…).

I’m looking forward, but if you find an other trick, tell us!

PS: I made a StreetMail Application in my system that print letter or fax in flash templates that output perfectly controled printouts.