Android – Bluetooth and WIFI Printing for Android

androidbluetoothprintersprintingwifi

We would need a portable printer (handheld, it is important) that can connect to android phone via bluetooth or wifi.

What I know currently:

No standard printing SDK available for Android this time
There is a non official SDK called iPrint SDK. Have any of you tried it through wifi or bluetooth? Does it work?
Printershare also claims to be programmaticly available. It would be ok for me to pay the one time fee $5 for it per phone. It has a lot of supported formats. Have you tried it with any handheld device? I asked them about the list of supported bluetooth printers (since it has a menu item "search for BT printer"), but they did not answered.

What I need to know above the already asked:

How do you print from your android app?
What kind of printer do you use?
Is it planned in the standard android SDK to include printing? What is the roadmap? Is it available now as Beta or something?
If we somehow (i dont think so) build own solution for printing via bluetooth, can you recommend standards and protocols to check and learn?

Best Answer

Starting with Android 4.4 you can print documents from a device to a hardware printer via wifi.

Android apps can now print any type of content over Wi-Fi or cloud-hosted services such as Google Cloud Print. In print-enabled apps, users can discover available printers, change paper sizes, choose specific pages to print, and print almost any kind of document, image, or file.

A brief example of how to start the printing process:

private void doPrint() {
    PrintManager printManager = (PrintManager) getActivity().getSystemService(Context.PRINT_SERVICE);
    printManager.print("My document", new CustomPrintDocumentAdapter(getActivity()), null);
}

where CustomPrintDocumentAdapter extends PrintDocumentAdapter.

More information is available on Android Developers.

Related Solutions

Android – How to close/hide the Android soft keyboard programmatically

You can force Android to hide the virtual keyboard using the InputMethodManager, calling hideSoftInputFromWindow, passing in the token of the window containing your focused view.

// Check if no view has focus:
View view = this.getCurrentFocus();
if (view != null) {  
    InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
    imm.hideSoftInputFromWindow(view.getWindowToken(), 0);
}

This will force the keyboard to be hidden in all situations. In some cases, you will want to pass in InputMethodManager.HIDE_IMPLICIT_ONLY as the second parameter to ensure you only hide the keyboard when the user didn't explicitly force it to appear (by holding down the menu).

Note: If you want to do this in Kotlin, use: context?.getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE) as InputMethodManager

Kotlin Syntax

// Only runs if there is a view that is currently focused
this.currentFocus?.let { view ->
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    imm?.hideSoftInputFromWindow(view.windowToken, 0)
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Android – How to stop EditText from gaining focus at Activity startup in Android

Excellent answers from Luc and Mark. However, a good code sample is missing. Adding the tags android:focusableInTouchMode="true" and android:focusable="true" to the parent layout (e.g. LinearLayout or ConstraintLayout) like in the following example, will fix the problem.

<!-- Dummy item to prevent AutoCompleteTextView from receiving focus -->
<LinearLayout
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    android:layout_height="0px"/>

<!-- :nextFocusUp and :nextFocusLeft have been set to the id of this component
to prevent the dummy from receiving focus again -->
<AutoCompleteTextView android:id="@+id/autotext"
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