Windows Printing

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

It is now much easier to find documentation in Info about using Emacs on 
MS Windows (w32). That is very nice and I hope that will attract w32 
users. However when looking at this I saw a problem with the information 
in "(emacs) Windows Printing".

Eli and I (with a lot of others involved) had a very long discussion 
about this on the help-gnu-emacs mailing list:

   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2006-01/msg00242.html

I think the tests I did clearly showed that everything does not work as 
the node above says. My conclusion was that the state of the printer is 
not reset when accessed in the way Emacs does it on w32. Getting the 
printer port is done in a standard way (I mean according to MS 
documentation) but sending the data is not supposed to be done as Emacs 
does it (if I understand this correctly, see the thread).

As it stands now I expect a lot of people to get into trouble when 
trying to print. There are two reliable ways to print on w32 that I am 
aware of (other ways has failed to me on most networked printers I have 
tried):

    - Use Ghostscript/GSview
    - Use something like htmlize.el + the web browser. (There is an 
alternative to htmlize.el but I have not tested that.)


What should we do about this node?