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Printing commands, such as lpr-buffer (see
Printing) and
ps-print-buffer (see PostScript) can work on MS-DOS
by sending the output to one of the printer ports, if a
Posix-style lpr program is unavailable. The same
Emacs variables control printing on all systems, but in some
cases they have different default values on MS-DOS.
See Windows Printing, for details about setting up printing to a networked printer.
Some printers expect DOS codepage encoding of
non-ASCII text, even though they are connected
to a Windows machine that uses a different encoding for the same
locale. For example, in the Latin-1 locale, DOS uses codepage 850
whereas Windows uses codepage 1252. See MS-DOS and
MULE. When you print to such printers from Windows, you can
use the C-x RET c
(universal-coding-system-argument) command before
M-x lpr-buffer; Emacs will then convert the text to
the DOS codepage that you specify. For example, C-x
RET c cp850-dos RET M-x lpr-region RET will print the region while converting it
to the codepage 850 encoding.
For backwards compatibility, the value of
dos-printer (dos-ps-printer), if it has
a value, overrides the value of printer-name
(ps-printer-name), on MS-DOS.