Re: Windows Printing

[Lennart Borgman]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> That's not what I said.  I said that I didn't see anything in the docs
> that specifically _precludes_ us from doing what Emacs does.
>   
No, the printer drivers of course have to do something like that. But 
they are printer specific. If you want to print to any printer on MS 
Windows without having to care about what type of printer it is then you 
must use the GDI interface instead as far as I understands it. On this 
higher level the printer obscurities are hidden.

I just want to point this out even though I guess you know. Or maybe you 
want to correct me?

> > That said my impression is that to print on w32 using GDI you should
> > do the same thing as when you use GDI to output to the screen.
> >     
>
> Yes, in principle.  But then you have the mess with choosing the right
> fonts, including for non-ASCII characters, the mess with figuring out
> the paper layout, etc. etc.
>   
Has not that kind of work been done in the ps-*.el libraries? Maybe they 
could produce GDI level style calls instead (meta level of course)?

>   
> > Does Emacs render the whole buffer with GDI or just the part that 
> > is visible at the moment?
> >     
>
> The latter, of course.  
Why of course? Is it because it would be to slow to do it another way 
or? I have came to the conclusion that it probably does so because of 
the multiplatform nature of Emacs. It could of course have been 
implemented differently on w32 (another abstraction level), but the 
scrolling I see on the screen does not look like something like that 
have been done. (That would be a big job I guess.)

> But that's for display; printing is different,
> obviously.  And like I said, this code should probably live outside
> Emacs in a lpr work-alike that we distribute.
>   
Yes, maybe with something like I suggest above?

>   
> > > > Then perhaps a link to http://EmacsWiki.org/ could be in the Info node? 
> > > >     
> > > >         
> > > That's something for the FAQ, not the manual.
> > >       
> > Could you please explain why?
> >     
>
> Because it's a minor point.
Ok. I do not agree but that is not necessary ;-)

The main thing in my opinion is that we should point to at least one 
supported way to print on w32 in a standard way in the Windows Printing 
node. That would be Ghostscript+GSView now then.