Re: w32 issues

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > You mean that printing is broken?  I don't agree with your wording,
> > but I have no objections to saying something like "Emacs will hang if
> > the user tries to print to a port that has no printer device connected
> > to it."
> >   
>
> Since that issue is a Windows problem, and unfixable in Emacs AFAIK, I 
> think the problem to put in FOR-RELEASE is that the DEFAULT setting for 
> printer-name on windows is a port that in 2008, will not be connected to 
> a printer for probably more than 90% of users.
>
> I am confused by all the code we have for printing these days. There is 
> a function default-printer-name, which would seem to offer a big 
> improvement on what we have now. It is used in dos-w32.el in functions 
> called from printing.el, but the code in printing.el does not seem to be 
> involved in the standard ps-print-* or print-* commands.

It looks to me like

  (defcustom printer-name
    (and lpr-windows-system "PRN")

should be just

  (defcustom printer-name nil

If printer-name is nil then the routines in dos-w32.el will use 
(default-printer-name).

But it does not help directly for the problem that Emacs hangs badly if 
it is a GDI printer on a USB port. But maybe we can just check that the 
name contains USB and assume if so at least warn the user? (In my case 
it is "USB001".) However I wonder if we should not issue the same 
warning in other cases too (see my previous messages).

Jason, you mentioned a work around setting up the printer to be 
networked. Is not the chance that it is a GDI printer rather high and 
that it will not work because of this?