Re: Printing

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

David De La Harpe Golden wrote:

> Since emacs is currently a "toolkit unto itself" for the most part, as 
> Stefan has already pointed out, it kind of makes sense for it to 
> generate its own postscript.  Though maybe just saving out and 
> "enscript"ing text files might currently work about as well...
> 

Hey, just found enscript homepage itself now recommends the "paps"
(giggle) command line tool for postscript printing of unicode text files.

http://paps.sourceforge.net/

See scans of me printing emacs hello with emacs' ps-print and
through paps - spot the difference:

http://harpegolden.net/misc/emacs-paps/emacs-hello-psprint.jpg
http://harpegolden.net/misc/emacs-paps/emacs-hello-paps.jpg

Yes, the paps output isn't _perfect_ (but all I did was saved
HELLO as utf-8 and fed it to paps), but it's already far, far better
- seeing as it supports non-latin1 stuff at all and all.

Lennart Borgman wrote:
  > Of course such work should be coordinated with what is needed on
  > GNU/Linux. (Something for Google Summer of Code?)

Turns out paps also apparently supports pango's small text formatting
markup language with the --markup flag:

http://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/unstable/PangoMarkupFormat.html

- if emacs could be persuaded to output such marked-up utf-8 text to be
filtered through paps, that might be a *very* short route to semidecent
printing, at least on GNU/linux and similar platforms.

Of course paps is using pango for its rendering - I guess Stefan's
aforementioned "real gtk" emacs port is a long-term solution for
free platforms, using the whole gtk+/cairo/pango stack (I believe
libm17n and libotf are also involved as a possible pango "shaper", but
don't really understand the whole area myself at present...) for a
unified vector-based screen GUI and print layer. Whole lot of work though.

But making emacs output utf-8 text marked up with pango markup language 
(for  replicating font-locking for quasi-wysiwig) to be fed through paps 
might be more at GSoC project scale ? Might even be too small...