Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> From: Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE>
> Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 22:18:42 +0100
> 
> Am 05.01.2006 um 21:44 schrieb Eli Zaretskii:
> 
> >> The problem is encoding of the PostScript fonts used to set the
> >> document. ps-print.el uses ISO 8859-1, independent from the buffer
> >> contents' encoding.
> >
> > I don't think this is true.  First, there's ps-mule.el that can be set
> > up to use other 8-bit encodings instead of 8859-1, if your printer has
> > the appropriate fonts loaded.  And second, you can install BDF fonts
> > for other character sets and set up ps-mule and ps-print for printing
> > almost any character set imaginable.
> 
> I don't want to print bitmaps. I have a genuine PostScript 3 printer.

``Don't want'' and ``doesn't work'' are two different things, you
know.  Your message to which I replied made it sound like Emacs
PostScript printing is broken for anything but Latin-1.  Which is
clearly not true.  All one needs is download and install the GNU
Intlfonts package and customize a few variables as documented in
ps-mule.el.  In addition to BDF fonts, there are Type1 and TrueType
fonts in that package.

Also, if you set up ps-mule.el to use non-ASCII fonts supported by
your printer, the printouts you will get will be as pretty as pure
ASCII, the fonts from Intlfonts are only used for characters not
covered by the printer's built-in fonts.

As for bitmaps, back when I looked into this, work was being done on
writing ps-type1.el which, like ps-bdf.el for BDF, was supposed to let
ps-print use Type1 fonts.  I don't know if this work was finished, but
if it wasn't, I'd suggest that people who are interested in enhancing
Emacs printing capabilities to work on Type1 and TrueType fonts,
instead of preaching that we delegate printing to IE.