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:
Download PostScript fonts to a printer
Convert and download TrueType fonts to a printer
Remove previously downloaded fonts from a printer
Report general information, orproperties, about a printer, such as the amount of RAM and hard disk capacity, and a list of available fonts, for example.
Print character samples
Reformat hard disk on a printer
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:
Type 1
Type 3
Type 9 (CID Type 0)
Type 10 (CID Type 1),
Type 11 (CID Type 2),
Type 42
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).
PostScript Language Reference Manual, 3rd ed. Adobe Systems Incorporated, ISBN 0-201-37922-8
The Type 42 Font Format Specification. Adobe Systems Technical Note #5012, July 1998.
TrueType 1.0 Font Files. Technical Specification Revision 1.66, November 1995 - Microsoft Corporation available from ftp.microsoft.com