Laser Printer Support

An application must have the mp utility to print EUC, BIG5, BIG5HK or UTF-8 files to a PostScript-based printer.

Using the mp Utility

The mputility supports all Asian locales. As a printing filter, mp generates a properly formatted version of the file content in PostScript format. Depending on the locale's system font configuration for mp, the Postscript output file contains glyph images from a scalable or a bitmap system font. The mp print filter is enhanced in the current Solaris release to print files of a certain type for each locale. See the mp(1) man page for more information.

You can use a command line such as the following to print a file with Traditional Chinese characters. The file might also include ASCII/English characters.

system%  mp filename | ld -d printer

Using mp as an Xprt (X Print Server) Client

Using mp as an Xprt client enables mp to print the output of any printer connected to a network supported by an Xprt print service. As an Xprt client, mp supports PostScript and many versions of PCL.

The Xprt client attempts a connection to an Xprt server based on the following rules:

• When the -D printer_name@machine[:dispNum] or -P printer_name@machine[:dispNum] options are used with the mp command, mp attempts to connect to an Xprt print service on machine[:dispNum] with printer_name.

  If the above attempted connection to machine[:dispNum] fails or if the argument given to -D or -P is just printer_name, then the mp command checks the XPSERVERLIST for Xprt servers that support the printer_name argument. For example:

  system% setenv XPSERVERLIST "machine1[:dispNum1] machine2[:dispNum2] \ machine3[:dispNum3]"

• If no server is found using above rules, mp checks for an XPDISPLAY environment variable set to machine[:dispNum]. For example:

  system% setenv XPDISPLAY "machine[:dispNum]"

• If the XPDISPLAY variable is not set or if the variable is invalid, mp tries to connect to the default display :2100. If the default display value is also invalid, mp exits with an error message.

  The /usr/lib/lp/locale/C/mp directory contains .xpr print page sample layout files for Xprt client. The sample files are for 300 dpi printers. If the target printer has a different dpi value, the dpi value of the sample files is automatically converted to the resolution of the target printer.