The variable *print-escape* controls whether the Lisp printer tries to produce notations such as escape characters and package prefixes.
The variable *print-readably* can be used to override many of the individual aspects controlled by the other printer control variables when program-readable output is especially important.
One of the many effects of making the value of *print-readably* be true is that the Lisp printer behaves as if *print-escape* were also true. For notational convenience, we say that if the value of either *print-readably* or *print-escape* is true, then printer escaping is “enabled”; and we say that if the values of both *print-readably* and *print-escape* are false, then printer escaping is “disabled”.