Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Lennart Borgman]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > Then I looked into the Emacs C development sources and read a bit about 
> > the printing interface in Windows. As far as I can see Emacs just does 
> > not implement the printing interface currently.
> >    
>
> Emacs needs either a port name or a printer name, and it treats those
> as if they were files.  These two possibilities cover most of the
> Windows printer configurations I've seen.  The question is, what is
> your configuration, and why these two possibilities don't work for it.
>  
You might be right. Maybe it can work. I do not remember all the tests I 
did any more why they failed and I leave it to someone else who think 
this is worth trying.

However if you want to do it the way you suggest don't you have to know 
the specifics of the printer then? In the environment where I am using a 
printer there are a lot of different printers so I really want to avoid 
doing anything that is printer specific. I want to use the printing 
interface that Windows supply. That interface handles all the printer 
specific details if you call it the right way.

Have I missed something in the sources? Does Emacs use this interface? 
If it does then I am simply wrong. If it does not then I prefer to use 
the system independent interface that Emacs supplies in 
browse-url-of-file which I use in htmlize-view.el.

The implementation of this interface is of course system dependent. What 
I am using is however could be described as the contract called 
browse-url-of-file that has been agreed upon in Emacs. It gives simple 
printing through the browser at least on Windows (and I guess many other 
systems). A big advantage as I see it is that it uses the printing 
interface that Windows has. This makes the handling of printers exactly 
as they use to be in all other Windows programs. I can choose printer, 
orientation, scaling, etc.