Re: Emacs Installer for MS Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Lennart Borgman" <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 02:06:10 +0200
> 
> I agree that the packaging and user-preferences basically should be
> separated. But it is also important to make a more easy road to emacs for an
> ms windows user.

Please don't do that: a freshly installed Emacs on Windows should
behave the same as on Unix.  Anything else calls for problems and
misunderstandings when peopel report bugs.

I completely agree with Stefan: anything that doesn't work out of the
box on Windows is a bug that should be solved in the core
distribution, not in add-on packages.

> I agree. Some time ago I sent a pointer to w32-printing.el that I have
> uploaded to http://www.emacswiki.org/. Since I uploaded this I have realized
> that I want to change some things in it, but basically it contain what I
> believe is an easy and sufficiently good printing solution for Emacs on ms
> windows. It does not however have all the options that printing.el have, it
> is a much simpler solution. The advantage it has is that it uses the default
> windows printing setup. I wrote it simply because I had trouble printing to
> the network printers at my job from Emacs. It can print in two ways:
> a) Through Notepad using just "notepad.exe /p"
> b) Through Internet Explorer. This uses htmlize.el to color the printout.

This is IMHO ridiculous: we should not use these tools to print, we
should instead add the code to Emacs to do whatever they do to find
the default printer.  Ghostscript does that, and Ghostscript is free
software, so someone should be able to look in its code and find the
trick.

> A user may want to use both this and the postscript printing. Postscript
> printing does not work without Ghostview which most users on ms windows does
> not have installed.

Postscript print does not automatically work on Unix, either, if you
don't have access to a Postscript-able printer.