Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Lennart Borgman]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> The CVS version of Emacs has the printing.el package that is supposed
> to provide these features.  But it only does that for PostScript
> output.  It would be a good idea to extend that so that external
> programs such as Ghostscript would not be required.  In other words,
> we need a platform-independent API to communicate with the system
> printers, and then we need to use that API in printing.el.
>  
I suggested this in another message and agrees that this would be good, 
but it might be much work. One of the first thing to decide must be how 
that interface should look to be platform indepentent. To understand the 
requirements on the Windows platform a good start is probably here:

  
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/gdi/wingdistart_9ezp.asp 

  
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/gdi/prntspol_0r1j.asp 


On windows you use the graphic drivers interface (GDI) for printing as 
you can read there. You do not use PostScript or even care about what 
formats the printers want. Are there something similar available on 
other platforms?