Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

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

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>Well, good luck, then  Getting _all_ the information will take an
>enormous amount of time.
>  
>
Maybe you did misunderstand me?

>>>      
>>>
>>No. I mean ASCII. Please look at the description of how the Text type is 
>>handled. That is the description I gave above where the GDI converts to 
>>EMF. In this process only ASCII is accepted according to the manuals at MS.
>>    
>>
>
>No, it accepts 8-bit text.
>  
>
Sorry, you are right. I misread that part. It only says "This data type 
is based on the ANSI standard, and if an application that has another 
character set creates text data it does not print. This often presents a 
problem in the extended character range, represented by values above 127.".

It does not say that it does not handle the characters above 127 at all 
- which I believed.

>  
>
>>>Here, for example:
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Sorry, I think you did not send that.
>>    
>>
>
>Oops.
>
>  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/graphics/hh/graphics/provider_b941f8a9-ddb3-47ca-afa2-d06c6de2ce74.xml.asp
>  
>
Thanks. This is what I have been reading too. I am however not sure that 
this text means that "copy" for example are handled this way. The text 
describes two steps where the spooler is used. In the first step the 
spooler sends the job to GDI for conversion and get it back from GDI. In 
the second step the spooler sends the data to the printer.

Could it not be that "copy" goes directly to the second step? However 
that partly seems to be unimportant now, when I believe that we agree 
that there probably is no way to convert PostScript during the first 
step. See below.

The "copy" in my case fails for most printers I have tried before. One 
possibility is that "copy" goes directly to the second step. I am still 
looking for information about that.

>  
>
>>>There's no need to convert PostScript to EMF, since a PostScript
>>>printer will be happy accepting the PostScript program as plain text.
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>What do you mean? How can you assume that it is a PostScript printer?
>>    
>>
>
>If it's not a PostScript printer, you cannot print PostScript to it.
>  
>
In the beginning of this long thread you said that it was a bad advice 
to tell new users to print from Emacs through their web browsers using 
htmlize-view.el. This provides colored printing. The printer of course 
must be a color printer, but it does not have to support PostScript.

If you want to print in colors from within Emacs then the only option is 
that it produces PostScript. Now I have assumed that we were looking for 
a way to get this printed even if the printer itself does not understand 
PostScript. One way to do this is using an external program like 
GhostScript. I said I wanted to avoid using an external program (except 
for the web browser which is already there and is already used by Emacs 
through browse-url-of-file for example).

I know of course there is a more basic problem: I can not even get black 
and white printing to work the way you have suggested (but there still 
might be one possibility left which I have not tried yet). However I 
keep both these problems (printing at all and printing PostScript) in 
mind while looking at the documentation. I am sorry if I have not been 
clear on this and you therefore did misunderstand me.

>  
>
>>And if it where, how can you assume that it is in a state where it 
>>accepts PostScript?
>>    
>>
>
>The printer enters the PostScript state automatically when it sees the
>PostScript preamble.
>  
>
I am sorry but I have seen printers where this does not happen.