Re: Printing from WindowXP version of emacs

[Ilya Zakharevich]

[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
Eli Zaretskii 
<eliz@gnu.org>], who wrote in article 
<mailman.19772.1134933877.20277.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>:
> > Please explain how you can print this buffer if all you know about the
> > printer is that it accessible through the named pipe "/pipe/printer-input".
> 
> Set printer-name to "/pipe/printer-input" and invoke lpr-buffer.

Will not do anything.  This pipe does not accept arbitrary-ASCII input.

> > Now repeat this assuming that the only character in buffer is U+0292.

> This doesn't have anything to do with the issue at hand, but the
> answer is the same, assuming you have your encoding stuff set up
> correctly wrt the encoding supported by the printer.

There is no "encoding supported by the printer".  You may assume that
the printer supports only its only "command set".

> > Are you assuming that sending character "a" to the printer pipe will
> > print "a" on paper?

> On MS-Windows, it does.

I know very little about Win*, but AFAICS, this thread is about the
fact that it does not.

> > I'm not even sure that typical printers-of-today can work with
> > one-sided-connection at all...

> Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by one-sided-connection, and
> neither what that has to do with this thread.

My understanding is that you indeed understand very little about what
this thread is about.

BTW, "connection" is the communication channel between the printer and
the computer.  There is no reason to assume that one can print using
one-sided communication (computer --> printer) only; at some moment
the printer may send some information back to computer, and expect it
perform some action.

Hope this helps,
Ilya