Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:11:01 +0100
> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>
> CC: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> >You can use the "net use" command to arrange for some port, like LPT2,
> >to redirect its output to this printer.  (I think this is explained in
> >the Emacs manual.)  Then all you need to do to print is to set
> >printer-name to "LPT2",
> >  
> >
> I will try, but is there any technical reason to assume that this works 
> differently?

I don't know, it's hard to tell without taking a good look at how your
printers are configured on that specific system.

> I guess I can then do
> 
>    copy file.txt lpt2:

Yes (but lose the colon after "lpt2", it's redundant).

> or should not this work too?

It should.

> Also, when accessing the printer on this level, as Iliya said, there 
> might be some problems.

What Ilya said made no sense.  You can try it yourself: send any
printable ASCII character to the printer (on a system where Emacs
_can_ refer to a printer by its //share/printer style name), and see
if that character gets printed.  Then, if your printer supports
Latin-1 characters, say, send some Latin-1 characters and see whether
it makes any difference.

> It was a long time ago I looked into this more in details, but what
> about the reset of the printer for example?

What ``reset of the printer''? what does that have to do with this
thread?  We were talking about printing text; by contrast, Reset is a
command that you send via some kind of managerial interface that has
nothing to do with Emacs or its way to send text to the printer.
Please don't make a mistake of taking Ilya's deliberations seriously.

> Can we be sure this is done here?

Why should it be done?  There's no need to reset the printer before,
after, or during sending text to it.

> Does someone has a good link to an overview of the printer reset, entry 
> points to the printer queue etc on MS Windows?

I'm sure the Windows print spooler operation is a fascinating subject,
but it has nothing to do with what we were discussing, which is how to
send text from Emacs to a printer.  These are two orthogonal issues,
in the sense that when I send text from Emacs, I don't need to know
anything about the spooler's operation.