Previewing Print Output
When the Print Preview option button is selected in the Jade Platform development environment Print Options dialog or the appropriate option is selected in a Jade runtime application, the first page of your report is displayed on the workstation monitor when the OK button is clicked, instead of output to the printer.
When a skin was used to preview the printing of a form and the background color of the skin had a white brush, the boundary of the printed output preview was not evident in earlier releases.
If the form or control is defined with a non‑default background color, that color is therefore used to draw the background, and the skin background definition is ignored so that the skin background is consistent, regardless of whether it is defined with a brush or a color.
Print output is directed to the preview file when the Printer class printPreview property is set to true.
As the print preview shows what your output will look like on a specific printer, the printer must be known before the preview is generated. (Paper sizes, printable regions, paper trays, and so on are not consistent across all printers.)
The Print button on the print preview does not necessarily send the output to your default printer; it is sent to the printer of the current print task (which defaults to your default printer).
The Title caption contains the current page that is being previewed and the total number of pages for your report; for example:
Preview of page 3 of 8 page report
With the focus in the print preview window, your cursor becomes a magnifying glass with a minus sign or a plus sign inside it. To increase the size of the page view by 20 percent, click the left mouse button. Alternatively, to reduce the size of the page view by 20 percent, hold down the Shift key and click the left mouse button.
You can page or scroll through the report, or you can select one of the buttons listed in the following table.
| Button | Action |
|---|---|
| Previous Page | Displays the previous page of the report. |
| Next Page | Displays the next page of the report. |
| First Page | Displays the first page of the report. |
| Last Page | Displays the last page of the report. |
| Specific Page | Displays the Print Page Select dialog, to enable you to specify a valid number of the page that you want to preview. |
| Zoom- | Reduces the size of (or zooms out from) the page in the preview area. Each click zooms out by an increment of 20 percent down to a minimum of 20 percent. The text box at the right of the Zoom+ button displays the zoom level of the current view. |
| Zoom+ | Enlarges the size of (or zooms in to) the page in the preview area. Each click zooms in by an increment of 20 percent up to a maximum of 500 percent. The text box at the right of the Zoom+ button displays the zoom level of the current view. |
| Reset Zoom | Resets the preview to the actual size view; that is, 100 percent. |
| Fit Whole Page |
Scales the whole preview page to fit into the preview window. |
| Print Report | Directs the report to the default printer or the printer specified in the Print Setup dialog. |
| Print Selected | Displays the Select Pages To Print dialog (for details, see "Using the Select Pages To Print Dialog", in the following subsection). |
| Find | Displays the Find Text dialog (for details, see "Searching Previewed Output", later in this section). |
| Find Next | Finds the next occurrence of the text specified in the Find Text dialog. |
| Cancel | Cancels the print preview. |
The text box at the right of the Zoom+ button displays the zoom level of the current view. In addition, it enables you to enter a custom zoom level in the range 20 though 500 (percent). The zoom changes to the specified value one second after you enter it.
Buttons that are not valid are disabled. For example, if the report has only one page the Next Page, Previous Page, First Page, Last Page, and Specific Page buttons are disabled. If the first page of a multiple page report is displayed, the Previous Page button is disabled. For details about controlling the display of the Print Report and Print Selected buttons during print preview, see the Printer class printPreviewAllowSelect property, earlier in this section.
The preview output is held in transient objects on your workstation until you choose to print or cancel it.
When the presentation client requests a print preview, the pages of the printed report do not have to be transferred to and from the application server. (This optimizes the performance of the print preview process when running Jade thin client mode over a slow network.) However, if your application calls the Printer class setReport method to indicate that user logic subsequently stores or manipulates the report output, each page of output is transferred to the application server.
