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.