Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Peter Boettcher <boettcher@ll.mit.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes (in a discussion with Ilya):

>> There is no "encoding supported by the printer".  You may assume that
>> the printer supports only its only "command set".
>
> I will assume what happens in reality, not some silly rules of game
> that you just invented.  In reality, the printer expects the text sent
> to it to come in some encoding.
>
>> > > Are you assuming that sending character "a" to the printer pipe will
>> > > print "a" on paper?
>> 
>> > On MS-Windows, it does.
>> 
>> I know very little about Win*, but AFAICS, this thread is about the
>> fact that it does not.

There are many printers out there now which do not support PostScript,
do not support PCL, and do not, in fact, even support plain text.
They are often called "winprinters" because the windows drivers
perform all the processing on the host CPU, and send simple rasterized
data to the printer.  The printer itself will not even print "a" when
told to.

On Linux, these printers are accessed via the normal lpr print spools,
but they have filters set up to rasterize the input PS or raw text
before outputing.

The question on windows is: how does one access the driver which (in
some cases) must rasterize the input, rather than going directly to
the device.  Copying plain text to the network name of the printer
seems not to do the right thing universally, which is why I use the
ugly notepad-hack when I need to do this sort of thing.


-Peter