A few minor improvements have been made to the Win32 printing patch, and it's as ready as I think it will get for 0.46 release. Can someone please commit it? https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/179988/comments/139
Here's the latest information on printing under Win32;
* Non-printing - FIXED
* Default page size problems - FIXED
* Print Scaling problems - FIXED
* White or black boxes over printing - FIXED - GTK uses the wrong call in Cairo (create_win32_surface, not the create_win32_printing_surface). There is a patch in the GTK bug tracker to fix this, but in the meantime we have bypassed that part of GTK. The code will revert to GTK automatically when GTK itself fixes the problem.
* All known crashes - FIXED Adrian Johnson has patched the Cairo libs to fix a rare crash with radial gradients. - There are two patched libs here (needs both) - http://annarchy.freedesktop.org/~ajohnson/cairo/ - A patch has also been submitted to the Cairo git repository - http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=cairo;a=commit;h=ae9635bf33cb989f5c525800b8... - If the cairo dlls for inkscape are built by patching 1.5.14 instead of building from git head Adrian recommends also getting the PostScript bug fix as well: http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=cairo;a=commit;h=13e05bffd5cae5690fada24c7a...
Remaining problems with Windows printing are;
* Some blurs are misaligned/mis-scaled - see https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/205732 The workaround is to print to bitmap (under rendering in the print dialogue)
* When printing falls back to bitmap, the bitmap is not always an ideal resolution. Again the workaround is to print to bitmap (Print -> Rendering -> Bitmap).