Re: Windows Printing

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

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> That's not what I said.  I said that I didn't see anything in the docs
>>> that specifically _precludes_ us from doing what Emacs does.
>>>   
>>>       
>> No, the printer drivers of course have to do something like that. But 
>> they are printer specific. If you want to print to any printer on MS 
>> Windows without having to care about what type of printer it is then you 
>> must use the GDI interface instead as far as I understands it. On this 
>> higher level the printer obscurities are hidden.
>>     
>
> Sorry, you are repeating some of the nonsense written in the original
> thread by someone who confessed that he knew almost nothing about how
> printing works on Windows.  AFAICS, there's nothing in the Microsoft
> documentation that backs up what he wrote.  Plain text output to a
> printer has nothing to do with raw byte streams sent by the printer
> drivers.
>   
I admit I am simplyfying things. I should have thought before writing. 
The printer drivers goes in on another level.

However that has not very much to do with the main argument. There are 
some support in MS Windows for the way Emacs prints, but it is not a 
full support for all printers and all kind of printing as far as I 
understands it. You have to use GDI for that. Or do you think 
differently? (Actually I do not believe you do, but I want it to be 
clear in the archives if someone wants to work on this.)

> ps-print solves this in a different way: it talks PostScript to a
> special printer driver, and that driver then takes care of converting
> to GDI.  Font selection is also different, take a look at ps-mule.el
> and ps-bdf.el.
>   
Yes I know. I just thought that the logic for taking care of pages etc 
is there.

> Yes.  In fact, the Windows-specific display code doesn't even see the
> whole buffer, only its part represented in the glyph matrices created
> by the higher-level platform-independent redisplay engine.
>   
Thanks. Would it be hard to let the display code see the whole buffer? I 
mean for printing.