Chapter 6 Setting Up Solaris Simplified Chinese Printing Facilities

The Simplified Chinese Solaris Operating System supports printing Simplified Chinese output through the following types of printers:

• Line printer with built-in Simplified Chinese fonts

• PostScript-based printer with built-in scalable fonts

• Any PostScript-based printer for bitmap printing

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  Note –

  Review the manufacturer's documentation on installing the printer before you complete the procedures in this chapter.

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Line Printer Support

For the Simplified Chinese Solaris Operating System to run a line printer, the printer must recognize EUC.

Using the EUC to GB Code Filters

A printer that does not support EUC needs filters that convert EUC files for printing. Use the commands in this section to print EUC files to non-EUC printers.

The following commands install the printer lp1 on port ttya. The commands signal the print service that lp1 accepts only GB format files.

# lpadmin -p lp1 -v /dev/ttya -I GB
# accept lp1
# enable lp1

See the lpadmin(1M) man page for more information.

You can use an lpfilter command shown in the following example to print files with formats that are not supported by the printer. The command line signals the print service that a converter called filter-name is available through the filter description file named in pathname.

# lpfilter -f filter-name -F pathname

The following example shows the output of pathname for a converter called euctogb. The pathname filter converts the default input type to GB with the euctogb converter.

Input types: simple
Output types: GB
Command: euctocgb

To print an EUC file, use a command line such as the following.

system% lp EUC-filename

To print a GB format file, use a command line such as the following.

system% lp -T GB GB-filename

Laser Printer Support

An application must have the mp utility to print Simplified Chinese characters.

Using the mp Utility

The mp utility supports all Asian locales including UTF-8 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 utility is enhanced in this release to print files of a certain type for each locale. For more information, see the mp(1) man page.

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

system% mp filename | lp -d printer