Re: Printing

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> The way every modern platform does that: through a printer API,
> whereby you select fonts and layout, then render text to some device,
> and the text gets printed to the printer you select.  Since Emacs
> already knows how to render text, it shouldn't be too hard to teach it
> do so to something other than a screen.
>   

The problem is that the way Emacs renders text, even in GUI toolkits, is 
based more on the way text is rendered on tty devices than on the 
standard way of rendering text in the GUI toolkit. That does make it 
somewhat harder to teach Emacs to render to a printer than it is for 
other native GTK, NS or Windows apps. ps-print is probably actually 
closer to what we need as a starting point than the existing redisplay 
code, as it already takes care of pagination (albeit assuming a constant 
font height apart from the header and footer), which is usually the 
difficult part of implementing printing support in a GUI app.

FWIW, I agree that printing would be better done that way, but given the 
complications of understanding and modifying the existing redisplay 
code, it will probably be another 10 years before it is, and will 
probably come out of something like a port of Emacs redisplay to cairo 
rather than a dedicated effort to add printing support to existing 
platform specific code.