Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / December 2004

Summary:

How can I draw some text to an offscreen view and then print it? Looking for
a simple way to do this.

Details:

I have a bunch of NSTextFields in a window, the contents of which must be
printed.  There is some other stuff in the window however, which I do not
want print with the text. Also the text must be repositioned for printing.

So, I decided the easiest way would be to copy the text from all of the
NSTextFields into an offscreen view, and then print that. But, I am running
into problems. Here is what I did:

 1.. Created a very basic subclass of NSView.

 2.. Instantiate this subclass from code using alloc/initwithframe.

 3.. Attempt to lockfocus on this NSView, so that I can draw text to it.

This is where I run into problems. Upon calling lockfocus I am given the
message in Run Log: "lockfocus sent to a view whose window is deferred and
does not yet have a corresponding platform window".

Do I have to put the view in a window if I want to draw offscreen? This
means I will have to instantiate the window as well as hide it, which is
more complicated than I had intended. It looks like my other option is the
unpublished defaultGlyphForChar method, using NSBezierPath to draw the text.
Again, this is not as simple as I was looking for. Is there an easy way to
draw text offscreen?