Re: postscript printing from emacs

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 23.03.2007 um 16:41 schrieb Stein Arild Strømme:

> I also find it suspicious that Preview.app in OS X cannot display  
> the file correctly (it does
> with other postscript files).

I reported this error before. Ps-print is pretty useless, in any case  
in Mac OS X. Besides this it only supports one or two encodings: US 7- 
bit ASCII and ISO 8859-1.

From the failure with Preview you can deduce that the Mac OS X and  
CUPS related mechanisms to prepare the PS output for printing are the  
reason that your printer reports a failure. It's nothing but non- 
sense that gets into the printer queue. (You can halt the queue and  
inspect what's in it!)

> So what is it about the ps-print-generated postscript files fools the
> printer and Preview.app, that's the question.

I presume it's like MSIE "optimised" web sites: only Ghostscript can  
convert and only Ghostscript can display. So the function family  
should better, before release of GNU Emacs 22.1, be renamed gs-print.  
BTW, the PDF output gs 8.54 produces from ps-print output on my Mac  
(Mac OS X 10.4.9) cannot be displayed in Preview, either.

> | > As alternatives, I'm exploring ways to use a2ps or enscript  
> instead,
> | > but they don't seem to support utf-8.  Other ways?
> |
> | Use htmlize to convert the buffer or region content to UTF-8 encoded
> | HTML, view it in a capable browser, print from the browser.
>
> That is tongue-in-cheek, surely?

No. It's a proven way. And it's the only way a few members on this  
list could find. The (Japanese) Carbon Emacs (Package) uses such a  
conversion and then uses an adapted version of the Coral application  
to convert HTML to PDF. You can try to use Apple's /System/Library/ 
Printers/Libraries/convert – it is meant to prepare or produce  
printer queue material.

Lennart Borgman has written htmlize-view.el to ease the conversion of  
buffer or region contents to HTML, and view it in your default  
browser. Then press Print ...


The problem with PostScript is that it usually only supports 8 bit  
encodings. So you can't print Unicode. You can try to find a CID  
keyed PostScript font and with some effort you can print CJK. No such  
font is available for free or public domain. TrueType and OpenType  
fonts have better Unicode support. Modern PostScript can use such  
TrueType fonts, which are quite often free and acceptable quality.  
But I have no idea how to create a mapping from an UTF-8 encoded text  
to a Unicode encoded font in PostScript.

--
Greetings

  Pete

Mac OS X is like a wigwam: no fences, no gates, but an apache inside.