Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>Similar things happen on MS-Windows; see this page for a more detailed
>description:
>
>  http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp
>  
>
Seems like a good starting point. I have been reading a bit under 
"Welcome - Part II Desktop Management - Ch 11 Enabling Printing and 
Faxing". Under this you find for example "Printing Concepts - Printing 
Job Formats". To me the usable formats there seems to be EMF and Text. 
The Raw datatypes seems to be for those processes that knows about the 
printer. When I print from any application in Windows I never care about 
the actual printer, just if it is a color printer. Of course I want it 
to work this way in Emacs too.

The Text format seems to be for black and white printing using only ANSI 
characters. Then it seems to me that we want to use EMF. The problem is 
how to do this then.

One solution I was thinking of before when I decided to make the 
prefather of htmlize-view.el was creating EMF just like printing.el 
produces PostScript today. This seems however to be a lot of work and 
especially troublesome if printing.el changes so I abondoned that idea. 
Including code from GhostScript (if there is some GPL variant of that 
today, I am not sure of that actually) or something similar in Emacs 
seems much better then. Should not that code do just the conversion 
above from PostScript to EMF (in principle)? Or am I misunderstanding 
something in the structure of the Windows printing interface here?

>When, on Windows, Emacs writes to a port such as PRN or to a share
>name such as \\server\printer, as if they were normal files, this
>creates a printer job that passes through a series of processors (see
>the URL above) and only in the end is sent through the wire to the
>physical device.
>  
>
Could you give a more specific description of where to find this? I can 
only find something about using those ports for local printing.