Printing multiple shapes in matlab

Question

Suppose I produced a few digits in my program. I want to give the user the opportunity to print them all at once. I do not want to show a print dialog for each page. Therefore, I show it only once and only for the first day. This is the solution I came up with so far:

figHandles = get(0, 'Children'); for currFig = 1:length(figHandles) if(currFig == 1) printdlg(figHandles(currFig)); % Shows the print dialog for the first figure else print(figHandles(currFig)); % Does not show the print dialog and uses the latest printer selection end end 

But the problem is that if the user cancels the print for the first digit, I can’t catch it and cancel the other prints. How do I achieve this?

Answer 1

Well, this is a pretty dirty trick, and there is definitely no guarantee that it will work for all versions. This works for me on Matlab 2013a / win 7.

To return Matlab to a print job or not, you need to insert a small hack into the print.m function.

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print.m

• Find the function print.m . It should be in the Matlab installation folders near ..\toolbox\matlab\graphics\print.m .

• After posting, make a backup! (this trick is insignificant and should not break anything, but we never know).

• open the file print.m and find the line LocalPrint(pj); , it should be near or at the end of the main function (~ line 240 for me).

• Replace the line with:

.

 pj = LocalPrint(pj); %// Add output to the call to LocalPrint if (nargout == 1) varargout{1} = pj ; %// transfer this output to the output of the `print` function end 

• Save the file.

Made for hacking. Now every time you call print , you can get a return argument full of information.

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Applicable to your case:

First, note that on Windows machines, the printdlg function printdlg equivalent to calling the print function with the argument '-v' .
So printdlg(figHandle) exactly matches print('-v',figHandle) . ( '-v' means verbose ). We will use this.

The output of the print function will be a structure (let it be called pj ) with many fields. The field you want to check to see if the print command was actually executed is pj.Return .

 pj.return == 0 => job cancelled pj.return == 1 => job sent to printer 

So, in your case, after setting up on print.m , it might look like this:

 pj = print('-v',figHandles(1)); %// Shows the print dialog for the first figure if pj.Return %//if the first figure was actually printed (and not cancelled) for currFig = 2:length(figHandles) print(figHandles(currFig)); %// Does not show the print dialog and uses the latest printer selection end end 

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Note. The pj structure contains much more information for reuse, including print job parameters, currently selected printers, etc.