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International Language Environments Guide

Chapter 8 Printing

Localization Printing Support Under the Solaris 8 Operating Environment

The Solaris environment provides support for PostScript printers. Custom print filters are available to convert localized text to PostScript. Seemp(1) anasipostprint(1) man pages for further details. Fonts can also be downloaded onto a printer.

For more details, see the download(1) man pages. This support is configured for PostScript printers.

Note -

The Solaris 8 environment has a unified printing filter that replaces all the locale-specific filters described below. This section describes this filter and which scripts are supported in each locale Sun supports.

This filter uses font glyphs from printer-resident fonts and TrueType fonts in the Solaris operating environment; PCF bitmap fonts in the Solaris system depend on the configuration information defined for each locale. For more information on PCF (Portable Compiled Format), see man pages bdftosnf(1) and bdftopcf(1).

European Printing Support

For European locales based on character sets that are not ISO-8859, such as Greek and Russian, prolog.ps files are supplied. The files are located in /usr/openwin/lib/locale/print.

When you print in one of these locales, the files are automatically downloaded to the printer. These fonts are PostScript Type 1 and include Times, Helvetica, and Courier.

These are in normal, bold, italic, and bold--italic styles.

This allows printing on PostScript printers from both CDE and OpenWindows desktops. From a command line, use /usr/openwin/bin/mp <filename> | lp in each locale that is not based on ISO 8859-1 character sets.

For the Eastern European locales such as Russian, non-iso-8859-1 encoded, prolog.ps files are supplied. The files are located in:

/usr/openwin/lib/locale/locale/directories/print/prolog.ps

for each relevant locale. At directories, insert one of the following:

/iso8859-2/

/iso8859-4/

/iso8859-5/

/iso8859-7/

/iso8859-9/

/iso8859-10/

The files are downloaded automatically when you print in one of the Eastern European locales. A minimum set of fonts allow printing.

The fonts in the prolog.ps files are defined in the following table.

Table 8-1 prolog.ps Fonts

/LC_Courier

/LC_Courier-Italic

/LC_Courier-Bold

/LC_Courier-BoldOblique

 

CourierCyr AliasFont

CourierCyr Inclined AliasFont

CourierCyr Bold AliasFont

CourierCyr BoldInclined AliasFont

 

/LC_Times-Roman

/LC_Times-Italic

/LC_Times-Bold

/LC_Times-BoldOblique

 

TimesNewRomanCyr

TimesNewRomanCyr-Inclined Aliasfont

TimesNewRomanCyr-Bold AliasFont

TimesNewRomanCyr-BoldIncl AliasFont

 

/LC_Helvetica

/LC_Helvetica-Italic

/LC_Helvetica-Bold

/LC_Helvetica-BoldOblique

 

LucidaSansCyr AliasFont

LucidaSansCyr ItalicFont

LucidaSansCyr-Bold AliasFont

LucidaSansCyr-BoldItalic AliasFont

Note -

Table 8-1 is an example of the ISO8859-5 locale. The actual prolog.ps will vary depending on the locale.

Asian Multibyte Printing Support

The xetops and xutops utilities convert Asian text into a bitmapped graphics printed image. This enables you to print Asian characters on PostScript-based printers, even without having Asian fonts resident on the printers.

A typical command line for printing such a file would be as follows:


system% pr <filename> | xetops |lp

or 


system% pr <filename> | xutops |lp 
(for the ko.UTF-8, zh.UTF-8 and zh_TW.UTF-8 locales)

Japanese Solaris 8 supports the following Japanese-specific printers:

Japanese texts can be printed with these printers through the LP print service. The following table shows the relation between these printers and user components. See JFP User's Guide for further details.

Table 8-2 Japanese Printer Support

Printer 

terminfo(-T) 

interface(-i) 

content(-I) 

filter 

Japanese PS 

PS 

jstandard 

postscript 

jpostprint 

Epson VP-5085 

epson-vp5085 

jstandard 

None 

jprconv 

NEC PC-PR201 

nec-pr201 

jstandard 

None 

jprconv 

Canon LASERSHOT 

canon-ls-a408 

jstandard 

None 

jprconv 

Use the following to set up a Japanese PostScript printer.

In the following example, the PostScript printer name is lw. The /dev/lp1 is the device that is associated with the printer. For more information, see thelpadmin(1M) man page.


# lpadmin -p lw -v /dev/lp1 -T PS -I postscript
# lpadmin -p lw -i /usr/lib/lp/model/jstandard
# cd /etc/lp/fd
# lpfilter -x -f postprint
# lpfilter -f jpostprint -F jpostprint.fd
# accept lw
# enable lw
# /etc/init.d/lp stop
# /etc/init.d/lp start

To print, use the following operation:


% lp -d lw Japanese Text File
Note -

These features are supported only on Japanese Solaris. Input codesets to a printer depend on the system locale.

Solaris Font Downloader

The Solaris Font Downloader is a vital part of internationalized printing.PostScript printers sold in different countries do not always have a set of locale-specific fonts installed on them. The usual solution for this problem was to have these locale-specific fonts included with each print job, which tended to lead to enormously large, slowly-processed, print jobs.

An alternative is to have all the frequently used fonts reside on the printer. They can be placed either in printer RAM, or on a hard disk if a printer has one connected to it. Most modern PostScript printers have the option of connecting a hard disk to them. The process of taking font files from the workstation and placing them on a printer is called "downloading." Fonts downloaded to RAM are available until the printer is power-cycled. Fonts downloaded to a hard disk are available until they are removed..

The Solaris Font Downloader is a GUI application for managing fonts on PostScript printers. It supports a number of different popular printers running PostScript Level 2 or Level 3 software and connected to a network with TCP/IP protocol.

Specifically, it provides the following functionality:

The Solaris Font Downloader works with a variety of different fonts available for a computer user. It can download the following PostScript fonts to a printer:

It can also convert TrueType fonts to PostScript fonts such as Type 42 fonts or CID (Type 11) fonts "on the fly", while these fonts are being downloaded. A PostScript software that supports such fonts uses these converted TrueType fonts as if they were regular PostScript fonts.

There are a number of user-selectable choices for converting TrueType fonts to PostScript fonts. These are fully documented along with the rest of the Solaris Font Downloader features in the man page fdl(1).

Reference Documents