mh-e: Printing
6.6 Printing Your Mail
======================
To print messages in MH-E, use the command ‘P p’ (‘mh-ps-print-msg’).
You can print all the messages in a range (as in ‘C-u P p 1 3 5-7 last:5
frombob <RET>’, 
Ranges). You can also send the output to a file
with ‘P f’ (‘mh-ps-print-msg-file’). This command will print inline
text attachments but will not decrypt messages. However, when a message
is displayed in an MH-Show buffer, then that buffer is used verbatim for
printing with the caveat that only text attachments, if opened inline,
are printed. Therefore, encrypted messages can be printed by showing
and decrypting them first. The commands ‘P p’ and ‘P f’ do not use the
options ‘mh-lpr-command-format’ or ‘mh-print-background-flag’, described
below.
Colors are emulated on black-and-white printers with shades of gray.
This might produce illegible output, even if your screen colors only use
shades of gray. If this is the case, try using the command ‘P C’
(‘mh-ps-print-toggle-color’) to toggle between color, no color, and a
black and white representation of the colors and see which works best.
You change this setting permanently by customizing the option
‘ps-print-color-p’.
Another related function is the command ‘P F’
(‘mh-ps-print-toggle-faces’). This command toggles between using faces
and not. When faces are enabled, the printed message will look very
similar to the message in the MH-Show buffer.
MH-E uses the ‘ps-print’ package to do the printing, so you can
customize the printing further by going to the ‘ps-print’ customization
group.
An alternative to using the ‘ps-print’ package is the command ‘P l’
(‘mh-print-msg’) (the l is for line printer or lpr). You can print all
the messages in a range. The message is formatted with ‘mhl’(1) and
printed with the ‘lpr’ command.
The command ‘P l’ uses two options. The option
‘mh-lpr-command-format’ contains the Unix command line which performs
the actual printing. The string can contain one escape, ‘%s’, which is
replaced by the name of the folder and the message number and is useful
for print job names. The default setting is ‘"lpr -J '%s'"’. I use
‘"mpage -h'%s' -b Letter -H1of -mlrtb -P"’ which produces a nice header
and adds a bit of margin so the text fits within my printer’s margins.
Normally messages are printed in the foreground. If this is slow on
your system, you may elect to turn on the option
‘mh-print-background-flag’ to print in the background. If you do this,
do not delete the message until it is printed or else the output may be
truncated. These options are not used by the commands ‘P p’ or ‘P f’.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) See the section Using mhl
(http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/shomes.html#Usisho) in the MH
book.
Info Catalog
mh-e: Reading PGP
mh-e: Reading Mail
mh-e: Files and Pipes