ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Printing
If the Flash runtime encounters a problem sending the print job to the printer (for example, if the printer is offline),
you can catch that exception, too, and provide more information or more options (such as displaying message text or
providing an alert within an animation). For example, you can assign new text to a text field in an if..else statement,
as the following code shows:
if (myPrintJob.start())
{
try
{
myPrintJob.addPage([params]);
}
catch (error:Error)
{
// Handle error.
}
myPrintJob.send();
}
else
{
myAlert.text = "Print job canceled";
}
For a working example, see “Printing example: Scaling, cropping, and responding” on page 932.
Working with page properties
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
Once the user clicks OK in the Print dialog box and PrintJob.start() returns true, you can access the properties
defined by the printer’s settings. These settings include the paper width, paper height (pageHeight and pageWidth),
and content orientation on the paper. Because these are printer settings, not controlled by the Flash runtime, you
cannot alter these settings; however, you can use them to align the content you send to the printer to match the current
settings. For more information, see “Setting size, scale, and orientation” on page 926.
Setting vector or bitmap rendering
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
You can manually set the print job to spool each page as vector graphics or a bitmap image. In some cases, vector
printing produces a smaller spool file, and a better image than bitmap printing. However, if your content includes a
bitmap image, and you want to preserve any alpha transparency or color effects, print the page as a bitmap image. Also,
a non-PostScript printer automatically converts any vector graphics to bitmap images.
You specify bitmap printing by passing a PrintJobOptions object as the third parameter of PrintJob.addPage().
For Flash Player and AIR prior to AIR 2, set the PrintJobOptions object’s printAsBitmap parameter set to true, as
follows:
var options:PrintJobOptions = new PrintJobOptions();
options.printAsBitmap = true;
myPrintJob.addPage(mySprite, null, options);
If you don’t specify a value for the third parameter, the print job uses the default, which is vector printing.
Last updated 6/6/2012
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