Re: Printing

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard M Stallman <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:02:19 -0400
> 
>     In this area, we basically didn't move much since ps-mule was
>     introduced more than 10 years ago.  Based on that experience, I fear
>     that if we stick to PostScript as the only decent printing facility in
>     Emacs, we will not improve our support of printing non-ASCII text for
>     the foreseeable future.  If you think otherwise, please explain how
>     come we are still where we were in 1998.
> 
> This is not the right way to choose the method for solving a problem.
> How much people have worked on this in the past is beside the point.

It's not beside the point: it can give us some idea how many people
are likely to work on it in the future.

> The real question about printing non-ASCII text is what needs to be
> done to make ps-print handle more character sets, and what the
> obstacles are.

I suspect there are no people among active contributors to Emacs who
know that.  Otherwise, they would have already solved this.

> Supporting application-specific APIs could be a big pain in the neck.
> Each one of them could be a big pain in the neck.

It could, but then again it could be much easier, too.

> Would you like to collect the docs of the APIs used for finding and
> specifying fonts on the various systems, so people can see what work
> is really involved in supporting them?

I will add this to my todo, but it's so long that there's no knowing
if I ever get to doing that.  Nor am I the ideal candidate, for that
matter: I'm not much of an expert on these APIs, I know only a couple
of them, and only very superficially.