Re: Printing

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 4:15 AM, YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
<mituharu@math.s.chiba-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 8 May 2012 03:25:33 +0200, Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> said:
>
>>> Actually, the primary motivation of introducing a cairo terminal
>>> was to support the generation of PDF data from the buffer contents
>>> directly using the Emacs redisplay engine, even from a tty session
>>> (i.e., without X server running), rather than supporting multiple
>>> window systems.  Showing a print dialog, sending the output to a
>>> printer, etc. will need another library or something, perhaps in a
>>> window-system dependent way.
>>>
>>> Do you possibly have some idea of "abstraction on a higher level"?
>
>> Ah, I see. Did you consider the printing already available in
>> nXhtml?  This makes html pages from buffers (and also from frames
>> for other purposes).
>
> I've heard of the conversion from a buffer contents to html, but I
> didn't know that it also supports the conversion from a frame.

That is just a minor convenience thing for those wanting to display
another type of screen shot.

> Yes, conversion to html is useful and handy for many purposes.
> Although the direct use of the Emacs redisplay engine in printing via
> cairo has its strength in reproducibility of some peculiarities such
> as compositions in Emacs display features, if people don't need them
> in printing so much, then it might be rather overkill.

If the goal is to produce a pdf file you can do that by first making a
html file and then display that in a web browser. From the web browser
you can then print or create a pdf.

What you get is just the buffer content (no extra headers or so), but
with colors.