Re: Printing

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

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 8:55 PM, David De La Harpe Golden
<david@harpegolden.net> wrote:
> On windows, the toolkit uses win32 drawing commands on a printer device
> context [2] instead of postscript drawing on a postscript document.
> Typically they might internally rasterise to a high-res DIB (.bmp) then
> printed with basically just one such win32 drawing command consisting of
> "draw this enormous .bmp please".

As Jason pointed out (and I guess you mean) printing using the ms w32
toolkit is done using GDI API:s. It is like outputting things to the
screen. Therefore printing on w32 is normally very simple to
implement. However Emacs does its own output to the screen and does
not use GDI API:s on that level.

Whether the output is a DIB file or a PostScript dito depends on the
printer used. (The printer driver that is part of w32 or installed
with the printer decides that.)

Like someone (Jason?) said it may be possible to use the code in
ps-*.el to implement calls to the w32 GDI API:s (some C code is of
course needed to for the API calls). If someone understands the
structure of both PostScript and the w32 GDI API:s involved
sufficiently well it would perhaps be rather easy. Of course such work
should be coordinated with what is needed on GNU/Linux. (Something for
Google Summer of Code?)