Re: Windows Printing

[Benjamin Riefenstahl]

Hi Lennart,


Lennart Borgman writes:
> I found that different (professional) printers were in different
> states before printing. Some accepted plain text, some accepted
> postscript.

Some printers support several printing languages or modes (like plain
text, Postscript and PCL).  There are printers that stay in the mode
that was used for the last print job until a timeout occurs, because
they don't actually recognise the end of the job.

The way that the high-level printer drivers that come with the OS
handle the situation is to send a prefix containing escape commands
before the actual print job.  The escape commands are crafted such
that they are ignored in Postscript mode but switch the printer to
Postscript in all other modes.

It is easy enough to add such a prefix to print jobs when printing
from Emacs.  A bit of browsing in Custom suggests setting the variable
ps-user-defined-prologue.  The problem seems to me to find out what
precisely should be in that prefix.

Often you can use some print-to-file option in the OS-supplied printer
driver to generate a dummy file.  You can than transcribe the correct
prefix bytes from that file.  When this doesn't work you really need
to look at the printer documentation, assuming you have that or can
find it on the 'Net.


benny