This section explains multibyte character set printing support in Oracle Reports. It also explains the IX and PASTA utilities, which are supported only for Oracle Reports when installed and used in conjunction with Oracle Applications.
Oracle Reports does not currently support Unicode character sets in PostScript output. As an alternative, you can use Oracle Reports PDF output (desformat=pdf), which supports multibyte character sets, and print it.
Oracle Reports supports a set of encoding schemes for the AFM files for the multibyte character sets.
See Also:
Chapter 9, "Managing Fonts in Oracle Reports" and Chapter 11, "Using PDF in Oracle Reports" for more font-related information.The fonts must be installed on the printer that prints the PostScript report output.
Suppose you build a report and its generated PostScript output contains a Chinese character set. First, you need AFM and PPD files that adhere to the encoding scheme for multibyte character sets. The destination printer must also have the required Chinese fonts installed because the PostScript file generated by Oracle Reports on UNIX does not have fonts embedded in it. The PostScript file contains only the font name and the font metrics taken from the AFM files. If you try to send the report to a printer that does not have the Chinese fonts installed, it will not print the Chinese characters properly.
When installed and used with Oracle Applications, Oracle Reports includes utilities for font embedding in PostScript output.
For character-mode reports, the utility is called PASTA. For bit-mapped reports, the utility IX enables you to embed the fonts in the PostScript output, thereby allowing you to print even if the font is not installed on the printer. Both PASTA and IX are supported only for Oracle Reports used with Oracle Applications.
When used for character-mode reports, PASTA takes tagged character mode output (generated through an appropriate prt file) and generates a PostScript rendition of it. IX enables Oracle Reports to print PostScript bit-mapped reports for all character sets, including UTF8, on a PostScript printer. With this functionality, PostScript printing in Unicode as well as all native languages on UNIX is supported. The IX library is turned off by default with the Oracle Reports patch.
Please refer to your Oracle Applications System Administrator's Guide for the setup and usage information for IX and PASTA with Oracle Reports. If you are a member of Oracle Metalink (http://metalink.oracle.com), you can also get this information from MetaLink notes 189708.1 and 159225.
If you have problems with PASTA, you can use the following technique to isolate the problem:
Unset the PASTA environment variable.
Try to perform the steps that caused the problem again.
If the problem reproduces without the environment variable set, then it should be treated as a normal Oracle Reports printing problem and the diagnostic steps provided in this document should be applied.
If the problem reproduces only with the PASTA environment variable set, then follow the diagnostic process given in the Oracle Applications documentation.