Chapter 8 Simplified Chinese Printing Facilities

Introduction

The Simplified Chinese Solaris operating environment supports printing Simplified Chinese output through the following types of printing facilities:

• Line printer containing built-in Simplified Chinese fonts

• PostScript-based printer

Before you can print Simplified Chinese, a system administrator must set up your Simplified Chinese printing support as described in Simplified Chinese Solaris System Administrator's Guide.

You can use the Simplified Chinese Solaris xetops utility to print files containing Chinese text on a PostScript printer. These printing facilities can be used directly from a command line or from within Simplified Chinese Solaris applications as discussed in the following sections.

Printing Chinese Output From a Command Line

Printing With a Line Printer

The Simplified Chinese Solaris operating environment uses EUC code sets. Its printing applications (such as desktop tools) generate PostScript code that uses EUC. If you use different PostScript printing, make sure it has the same capabilities.

To print an EUC file, use the command in the following example:

system% lp EUC_filename 

To print a GB format file on a printer that supports this format, use the following command:

system% lp -T GB GB_filename 

For more information on setting up the GB filter, see Simplified Chinese Solaris System Administrator's Guide.

Printing With the xetops Utility

The xetops utility converts Chinese text into a bitmapped graphics printed image. A typical command line for printing a file named filename containing Simplified Chinese characters, with or without ASCII/English characters, would be as follows:

system%  pr filename | xetops | lp

Make filename the name of the file to print. This file may contain ASCII/English characters as well as Chinese. Refer to the xetops(1) man page for more detailed information.

The xetops utility allows you to print Simplified Chinese characters using a PostScript-based printer.

In the zh.GBK locale, the xetops utility allows you to print Simplified Chinese characters using TrueType or Bitmap fonts. For TrueType fonts, you can select four typefaces, including FangSongTi, SongTi, HeiTi, and KaiTi. For usage information on xetops, type

system%  xetops -h

The following syntax information is returned:

xetops  [-r] [-B|[-T [-t S|F|K|H] [-s [i]|m|c]
					  	  [-p A3|A4|A5|B5|USLtr|USLgl]
						  [-o length=i|c| [,width=i|c]]
                 [filename]

The options for xetops are as following:

• -r: prints the file in landscape mode.

• -B: prints the file using bitmap fonts. (The default is TrueType SongTi font.)

• -T: prints the file using TrueType fonts.

• -t: use this option to specify up to four typefaces. S indicates SongTi, F indicates FangSongTi, K indicates KaiTi, and H indicates HeiTi.

• -s: designates the size of each character. i stands for inches, m stands for millimeters, and c stands for centimeters. (The default is inches.)

• -p: specifies the paper size (A3, A4, A5, B5, US Letter, or US Legal)..

• -o: specifies the length and width of the paper. i stands for inches, and c stands for centimeters. (The default is the number of the lines.)

Here are some examples of pr and xetops. The following command:

system% pr filename | xetops | lp

will print the file using the SongTi TrueType font. The printed characters will be 4mm in size.

The following command:

system% pr filename | xetops -t K -s 8m | lp

will print the file using the KaiTi TrueType font. The printed characters will be 8mm in size.

The following command:

system% xetops -t H -s 1.2 filename | lp

will print the file using the HeiTi TrueType font. The printed characters will be 1.2 inches in size.

The following command:

system% xetops -B filename | lp

will print the file using a bitmap font.

Printing with the mp Utility

A new and enhanced mp(1)print filter is available in the Solaris 8 environment to print various input file formats including flat text files written in UTF-8. It uses TrueType and Type 1 scalable fonts and X11 bitmap fonts available on the Solaris system.

The output from the utility is standard PostScript, and can be sent to any PostScript printer.

Starting with the next release of the Solaris environment, xutops (10) will be obsolete.

To print with the mp utility, type the following:

system% mp filename | lp

You can also use the utility as a filter, as the utility accepts stdin stream:

system% cat  filename | mp | lp

You can set the utility as a printing filter for a line printer. For example, the following command sequence tells the printer service LP that the printer lp1 accepts only mp format files. This command line also installs the printer lp1 on port /dev/ttya. See the lpadmin (1m) man page for more details.

system% lpadmin -p lp1 -v /dev/ttya -I MP
system% accept lp1
system% enable lp1 

You can add the lpfilter utility for a filter by using the lpfilter(1M) command as follows:

system% lpfilter -f filtername -F pathname

The lpfilter command tells LP that a converter (in this case, xutops) is available through the filter description file named pathname. The pathname can be determined as follows:

Input types: simple
Output types: MP
Command: /usr/bin/mp 

The filter converts the default type file input to PostScript output using /usr/bin/mp.

To print a UTF-8 text file, use the following command:

system% lp -T MP UTF-8-file

For more details on the mp(1) command, refer to the mp(1) man page.