Plain text documents may be mundane, but they are at the heart of many common applications.  They include standard output of all kinds: program listings, generated reports, data printouts, log files, tables, archival files that in the past were printed on line printers, and even today most email, news, help and documentation files. 

Basic Java printing was introduced in JDK 1.1 but only really supports printing what your program displays on the screen.  Full rich text printing is planned for future releases of Java, but today even printing simple text documents is hard.  There is no support for pagination, page formatting, line wrap, or tabs.  There is no easy way to print the entire contents of text areas, strings, or string buffers central to many applications.

• pagination
• line wrap
• line breaks
• line spacing
• tab expansion
• margins (left, right, top, and bottom)
• headers (left and right) - can't change in free version
• footers (left and right)
• page numbering
• date and time formatting
• font selection

• TextPrinter is simple to use - a single zero-argument constructor and a single call to a print method is all that's needed. All parameters are accessed by single-value set and get methods.
• TextPrinter is a JavaBean that works great in visual application builders and is also provided as a simple class for programmatic use.
• TextPrinter works today with JDK 1.1 and will continue to work in JDK 1.2.  No need to wait for future JDK's to solve this problem.
• This is the kind of code that isn't easy to write and isn't what you want to be doing, yet is something many applications need.
• The free version of TextPrinter is limited only in that it prints a copyright notice in the headers and is licensed for commercial and non-commercial use.  The unrestricted version and source code are also available.