Printing on M$

Printing on M$

[dhruva]

Hello,
 I am starting a new thread to discuss the printing issues on M$ systems.

I am working on writing a standalone program to better understand the
printing under M$. I have a fundamental question:

1. For the first attempt, it is enough to have a M$ application like
behavior for Emacs on M$? On selecting "Print", display the dialog box
to select the printer and set all the printer specifics and print the
buffer. This is the normal way it is done in most applications on M$.

I am exploring the GDI interface and seems quite structured (compared
to other things on M$)

-dky

-- 
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Re: Printing on M$

[dhruva]

Hi,

On Jan 21, 2008 11:44 AM, dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am exploring the GDI interface and seems quite structured (compared
> to other things on M$)

Do I concentrate on getting RAW text printing using GDI interfaces? I
have written a small tool from which I can get the printer selection
dialog box (with default printer selected) and print the file I have
given from the command prompt. I am in the process of adding page
break support and that should make a working command/code.

However, I am not able to print images or other file types by using
different printing processors. I will explore it later once I get page
breaks in place.

-dky

-- 
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Re: Printing on M$

[Jason Rumney]

dhruva wrote:
> 1. For the first attempt, it is enough to have a M$ application like
> behavior for Emacs on M$? On selecting "Print", display the dialog box
> to select the printer and set all the printer specifics and print the
> buffer. This is the normal way it is done in most applications on M$.
>   
The objective should be to print natively on all platforms. GTK has a 
similar method of printing to Windows as I understand it, so if you want 
to work on support for Windows, it is probably best to read the GTK docs 
as well, and try to write code that can be shared between the 
implementations.

Normally on Windows, printing code is shared with redisplay, but the 
optimisations in Emacs's redisplay code may make this difficult.

Re: Printing on M$

[Jason Rumney]

dhruva wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Jan 21, 2008 11:44 AM, dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I am exploring the GDI interface and seems quite structured (compared
>> to other things on M$)
>>     
>
> Do I concentrate on getting RAW text printing using GDI interfaces? I
> have written a small tool from which I can get the printer selection
> dialog box (with default printer selected) and print the file I have
> given from the command prompt. I am in the process of adding page
> break support and that should make a working command/code.
>   

That could be a useful interim solution as a substitute for the "print" 
command, which is not available on some versions of Windows. If it could 
send postscript files directly to printers that can support them, and 
reject them with a warning dialog otherwise then we could use it for 
ps-print too.

Re: Printing on M$

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:24:47 +0000
> From: Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
> Cc: "Lennart Borgman \(gmail\)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>,
> 	Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> dhruva wrote:
> > 1. For the first attempt, it is enough to have a M$ application like
> > behavior for Emacs on M$? On selecting "Print", display the dialog box
> > to select the printer and set all the printer specifics and print the
> > buffer. This is the normal way it is done in most applications on M$.
> >   
> The objective should be to print natively on all platforms. GTK has a 
> similar method of printing to Windows as I understand it, so if you want 
> to work on support for Windows, it is probably best to read the GTK docs 
> as well, and try to write code that can be shared between the 
> implementations.

That's best if dhruva can do it.  But if printing natively on all
platforms is too much of a challenge, I'd settle for a simpler
alternative: have a separate program that Emacs will invoke and pipe
text to, and have that program pop up the Windows Print menu and print
using GDI.  That would be similar to what Emacs does on Posiz systems:
invokes `lpr', an external program.

> Normally on Windows, printing code is shared with redisplay, but the 
> optimisations in Emacs's redisplay code may make this difficult.

If that is a problem, the optimizations can be disabled.