Re: Printing

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>>>> Writing a pdf-file would of course allow printing on w32 more simple
>>>> too - if you install some software to read and print pdf.
>>> Considering that I'd rather not encourage people to install proprietary
>>> software, is it really significantly easier to install support for
>>> printing PDF than support for printing Postscript (in Windows)?
>> Yes, I think so since most people already have a viewer for PDF
>> installed. And that viewer can be used to print.
>
> AFAIK, Windows comes neither with a Postscript viewer/printer nor with
> a PDF viewer/printer.  So for ps-print.el we have to ask people to
> install Ghostscript on such systems.  Assuming we had pdf-print.el,
> which other software would we tell people to install?  As mentioned
> non-proprietary options are unacceptable.
>
> This said, maybe ps-print.el could be changed so it can run `gs'
> directly (under Windows); this would mean that the user only needs to
> install Ghostscript without configuring something like redmon and
> creating a special postscript virtual printer.

An easy way would perhaps be to write a temporary pdf-file and then
call w32-shell-execute on that file with "print" as the operation.