Re: Printing

[Lennart Borgman]

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 3:04 AM, YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
<address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, 7 May 2012 13:25:23 +0200, Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> said:
>
>>> Perhaps I'll work a bit locally first, starting with adding a new
>>> type of (output-only) graphical terminal for printing.  The idea is
>>> to add a printing support via cairo without being tied with a
>>> particular window system.
>>>
>>> Is anyone already working for supporting multiple types of
>>> graphical terminals simultaneously?
>
>> Is Cairo enough to make a general printing system? Should not the
>> abstraction be on a higher level so that different OS:es can be
>> supported?
>
> Actually, the primary motivation of introducing a cairo terminal was
> to support the generation of PDF data from the buffer contents
> directly using the Emacs redisplay engine, even from a tty session
> (i.e., without X server running), rather than supporting multiple
> window systems.  Showing a print dialog, sending the output to a
> printer, etc. will need another library or something, perhaps in a
> window-system dependent way.
>
> Do you possibly have some idea of "abstraction on a higher level"?

Ah, I see. Did you consider the printing already available in nXhtml?
This makes html pages from buffers (and also from frames for other
purposes).