Re: Emacs Installer for MS Windows

[Vinicius Jose Latorre <viniciusjl@ig.com.br>]

 > From: "Eli Zarestkii" <eliz@gnu.org>
 >
 > >From: "Lennart Borgman" <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>
 > >> Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 02:06:10 +0200
 > >>
 > >> I agree that the packaging and user-preferences basically should be
 > >> separated. But it is also important to make a more easy road to 
emacs for an
 > >> ms windows user.
 >
 >
 > Please don't do that: a freshly installed Emacs on Windows should
 > behave the same as on Unix.  Anything else calls for problems and
 > misunderstandings when peopel report bugs.
 >
 > I completely agree with Stefan: anything that doesn't work out of the
 > box on Windows is a bug that should be solved in the core
 > distribution, not in add-on packages.

I also completely agree with Eli and Stefan.


 > >> I agree. Some time ago I sent a pointer to w32-printing.el that I have
 > >> uploaded to http://www.emacswiki.org/. Since I uploaded this I 
have realized
 > >> that I want to change some things in it, but basically it contain 
what I
 > >> believe is an easy and sufficiently good printing solution for 
Emacs on ms
 > >> windows. It does not however have all the options that printing.el 
have, it
 > >> is a much simpler solution. The advantage it has is that it uses 
the default
 > >> windows printing setup. I wrote it simply because I had trouble 
printing to
 > >> the network printers at my job from Emacs. It can print in two ways:
 > >> a) Through Notepad using just "notepad.exe /p"
 > >> b) Through Internet Explorer. This uses htmlize.el to color the 
printout.
 >
 >
 > This is IMHO ridiculous: we should not use these tools to print, we
 > should instead add the code to Emacs to do whatever they do to find
 > the default printer.  Ghostscript does that, and Ghostscript is free
 > software, so someone should be able to look in its code and find the
 > trick.

Indeed, Emacs already has code in Emacs Lisp to deal with this, the packages
are:

 lpr.el --- print Emacs buffer on line printer
 Copyright (C) 1985, 1988, 1992, 1994, 2001, 2003
 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

 ps-print.el --- print text from the buffer as PostScript
 Copyright (C) 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

 printing.el --- printing utilities
 Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004
 Free Software Foundation, Inc.


 > >> A user may want to use both this and the postscript printing. 
Postscript
 > >> printing does not work without Ghostview which most users on ms 
windows does
 > >> not have installed.
 >
 >
 > Postscript print does not automatically work on Unix, either, if you
 > don't have access to a Postscript-able printer.

Ghostview is used for previewing a PostScript file.  It also can be used to
preview a PDF file.

Ghostscript is used for printing a PostScript file if you don't have a
PostScript printer.

To print a PostScript file in Windows, Unix or any other OS you need to 
have a
PostScript printer.