Re: Printing

[David De La Harpe Golden]

David De La Harpe Golden wrote:

> Since emacs is currently a "toolkit unto itself" for the most part, as 
> Stefan has already pointed out, it kind of makes sense for it to 
> generate its own postscript.  Though maybe just saving out and 
> "enscript"ing text files might currently work about as well...

Hey, just found enscript homepage itself now recommends the "paps"
(giggle) command line tool for postscript printing of unicode text files.

http://paps.sourceforge.net/

See scans of me printing emacs hello with emacs' ps-print and
through paps - spot the difference:

http://harpegolden.net/misc/emacs-paps/emacs-hello-psprint.jpg
http://harpegolden.net/misc/emacs-paps/emacs-hello-paps.jpg

Yes, the paps output isn't _perfect_ (but all I did was saved
HELLO as utf-8 and fed it to paps), but it's already far, far better
- seeing as it supports non-latin1 stuff at all and all.

Lennart Borgman wrote:
 > Of course such work should be coordinated with what is needed on
 > GNU/Linux. (Something for Google Summer of Code?)

Turns out paps also apparently supports pango's small text formatting
markup language with the --markup flag:

http://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/unstable/PangoMarkupFormat.html

- if emacs could be persuaded to output such marked-up utf-8 text to be
filtered through paps, that might be a *very* short route to semidecent
printing, at least on GNU/linux and similar platforms.

Of course paps is using pango for its rendering - I guess Stefan's
aforementioned "real gtk" emacs port is a long-term solution for
free platforms, using the whole gtk+/cairo/pango stack (I believe
libm17n and libotf are also involved as a possible pango "shaper", but
don't really understand the whole area myself at present...) for a
unified vector-based screen GUI and print layer. Whole lot of work though.

But making emacs output utf-8 text marked up with pango markup language 
(for  replicating font-locking for quasi-wysiwig) to be fed through paps 
might be more at GSoC project scale ? Might even be too small...