test

International Language Environments Guide

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