Re: Emacs Installer for MS Windows

[Lennart Borgman]

Excuse me for the length of this mail. I just want to be clear because of
the risk of confusion here.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vinicius Jose Latorre" <address@hidden>
>  > >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 also completely agree with Eli and Stefan.

I believe there are two different problems here. One is when something does
not work or does not work as expected. The second is when Emacs behaves in a
way that is unexpected to an MS Windows user. In this case I mostly think
about key bindings.

In the first case I agree of course. No problem at all.

In the second case I am a little bit more doubtful. However I believe that
Stefan's suggestion to "have an installation option to install a "vanilla
Emacs" or "Emacs with
w32 tweaks"" is the best.

I understand the concern about the bug reports but I hope that it can be
solved by clearly stating that some things in Emacs are changed if "w32
tweaks" are choosen. Anyway is not this a normal problem with bug reports
for Emacs?

...
>  > >> 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.
>
> Indeed, Emacs already has code in Emacs Lisp to deal with this, the
packages
> are:
>
>  lpr.el --- print Emacs buffer on line printer
>  Copyright (C) 1985, 1988, 1992, 1994, 2001, 2003
>  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>
>  ps-print.el --- print text from the buffer as PostScript
>  Copyright (C) 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
>  2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>
>  printing.el --- printing utilities
>  Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004
>  Free Software Foundation, Inc.

I am glad for the clarification, but I still see some confusion here. Please
correct me if I am wrong. As far as I know the tools above does not honor
the setting of the default printer in ms windows. That is simply because
this option is not available in the current Emacs release (but it will be in
the next).

When this is available there is of course no reason to use notepad.exe for
printing ;-)

However since I have never been able to use any of the above I still wonder
about colored printouts. I surely want colored printouts on my default ms
windows printer. Will they allow this? I do not care whether it is a
PostScript printer or not. I just want the printout. The solution I
suggested is indeed far from an optimal solution but it gives me the colored
printout.

- Lennart