Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:11:01 +0100
> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>
> CC: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> It think I saw something like this for ASCII input only.

I think it's more general than that.

> Actually the printer processor first calls GDI which produces EMF
> that is send to the printer driver.

I don;t think we should worry about what the printer processor does:
it's part of the OS.  What matters is what it accepts, not what it
does with that.

> So this can print text (only ASCII actually if I remember
> correctly).

You probably mean ANSI (which includes 8-bit non-ASCII characters in
addition to ASCII), but I think it's more general than that.  Why
would the mechanism I described be limited to ANSI text?  Why cannot
it work for Unicode as well?

> That should mean that the above "copy" should work.

I don't see how these two issues are related; perhaps I'm missing
something.  If they are NOT related, then the fact that COPY doesn't
work and the inner workings of the Windows printing mechanism are two
almost unrelated subjects, and we are wasting our time talking about
the latter when we are interested in the former.

> However I do not remember that I saw anything about exactly when this 
> works. Do you have an exact link where you found this?

Here, for example:

> Last time I looked into this I stopped about here because I thought it 
> was not worth the trouble. As far as I can see it will only handle ASCII 
> text when it works. I have seen very little that makes me believe that 
> GDI can handle PostScript and convert that to EMF in the above scenario. 

There's no need to convert PostScript to EMF, since a PostScript
printer will be happy accepting the PostScript program as plain text.