Re: Need contact to solve ntEmacs problems with accented characters

Re: Need contact to solve ntEmacs problems with accented characters

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Ryszard Kubiak wrote:

>     GNU Emacs 21.1.1 (i386-msvc-nt5.0.2195) of 2001-10-22 on buffy
> 
> and the system where I experience problems with printing is Windows 2000.
> The coding used for accented characters is cp1250, as you probably 
> know. I work with MULE with the settings that I quote below. The 
> printer is a network one, connected to an NT server.
> 
> I had made experiments using the method you described in yor letter (setting
> a coding prior to lpr-buffer). The codings I experimented with were 
> iso-8859-2, cp1250 and cp852. All gave similar bad results -- the 
> accented characters were badly printed.

What happens if you change the value of printer-name so that the printed 
text goes to a disk file?  Can you then visit that file with "C-x RET c 
CODING RET C-x C-f", where CODING is the same encoding you used with 
lpr-buffer?

If this experiment succeeds, then Emacs is doing what it's supposed to 
do, and the cause of your problem is in the printer setup: it might not 
support the character sets you are trying to use.

Could you please describe in more detail what does ``accented characters 
were badly printed'' mean?  How exactly are they printed? what do you see 
on paper?

> I very much suspect that my problem with printing may be somehow related
> with two other ones which I've encountered. Namely,
> 1. Dired's directory badly displays accented characters though the coding
> used there is cp1250.
> 2. Font selection in --unibyte mode does not work. Whatever font I select,
> using methods
> described in the documentation and avrious FAQs, the accented characters
> seem to come from latin-1.

No, I think these problems are different ones.  The problem with Dired 
should be solved by setting file-name-coding-system to latin-2 or cp1250.

> Are you capable of working with cp1250 characters in your environment so
> that you can judge the results?

Yes, but I don't have a printer capable of printing those characters, so 
I cannot test lpr-buffer with cp1250.

Re: Need contact to solve ntEmacs problems with accented characters

[Eli Zaretskii]

[Please don't remove the bug mailing list from the CC: header.]

> From: "Ryszard Kubiak" <ryszard.kubiak@biu.com.pl>
> Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 14:29:44 +0200
> 
> The experiment with printing to a file succeded -- the coding of the
> file happens to be cp1250-dos, as it should be. If this success means
> that the printer uses a different coding then what that coding is?

I don't know yet.

What happens if you send the file produced like above to the printer
_as_a_file, using some utility that can print a disk file?  Does it
print as you expect?

> Why other text editors, such as the one in Delphi, do not have
> problems with printing, if they work with files in cp1250, too? Do
> these other editors know something about printing in Windows that I
> do not know, for example, that printing needs Unicode?

One problem could be the way Emacs sends output to the printer.
What's your value of printer-name (the ``normal'' value, before you
changed it to print to a disk file)?

> The letter /l is shown a a little centered circle,  /o (oacute) comes as
> Greek \mu, /c (cacute) as i with an accent, /a (aogonek) as reversed
> ?, and so on.

Sounds like Windows is interpreting your text as if it were encoded
in some DOS OEM codepage, not cp1250.

> > > 2. Font selection in --unibyte mode does not work. Whatever font I
> select,
> > > using methods
> > > described in the documentation and avrious FAQs, the accented characters
> > > seem to come from latin-1.
> 
> This is also very annoying. I cannot select a font for the accented letters
> to be shown properly in unibyte mode.

Sorry, I don't know enough about font handling on Windows.

Why do you need to run Emacs in unibyte mode, anyway?