Emacs printing is broken -- and I mean it -- is *fundamentally*,
    totally broken. You have either to be a PostScript guru, restrict
    yourself to ASCII characters, or cheat/hack to be able to use Emacs
    printing.

I am sure that is not true.  I am not a PostScript guru, but when I
use ps-print-buffer, it works fine.

This is not to say that there can't be bugs.  I see you included
some test cases -- thank you for them.  I hope people will fix them.

    b) Use standard GTK+ printing facilities as GEdit and many other
       applications do. Emacs is built with GTK+ interface for quite some
       time now, so I suppose there should be no architectural problem in
       using GTK+ for printing as well. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Sorry, that won't work.  Emacs can be built with several display
platforms, GTK being just one.  Sometimes none is used.  I normally
use Emacs on a tty and I want printing to work there too.