Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Lennart Borgman]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > 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.
>  
I think we need all information we got to get the pieces together here. 
Unfortunately we have to go into a guessing game since none of us seem 
to be able to find all information we need here.

>  
>
> > 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?
>  
No. I mean ASCII. Please look at the description of how the Text type is 
handled. That is the description I gave above where the GDI converts to 
EMF. In this process only ASCII is accepted according to the manuals at MS.

>  
>
> > 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.
>  
I am not sure they are unrelated. It might have to do with what the 
process above accepts, but I am not at all sure. I am just trying to 
keep all doors open at the moment. It make things a bit more complicated 
of course, but we are looking for some facts we have not found yet. We 
may well be in a part of the system that sometimes work, but for reasons 
we do not know yet.

I tend to work this way in cases like this. Please do not assume that I 
am not aware that they may not be related. I am.

>  
>
> > 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:
>  
Sorry, I think you did not send that.

>  
>
> > 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.
>  
What do you mean? How can you assume that it is a PostScript printer? I 
have not been talking about any such.

And if it where, how can you assume that it is in a state where it 
accepts PostScript? That depends on the behaviour of the specific 
printer driver. I do not believe we can assume anything about that - 
except that it will behave (reasonably) well if we are using the MS 
Windows printing interface in the way it is recommended in the 
documentation.