Printing Facilities

The Solaris environment provides the following support for Simplified Chinese printing:

• A line printer containing built-in Simplified Chinese fonts. This printer enables you to use lp and iconv utilities to print any text file encoded in GB2312 and UTF-8. Your system administrator can also set up print filters to automatically convert input from EUC to the codeset of the targeted printer.

• PostScript-based line printer emulation that provides the xetops and xutops utilities that convert Simplified Chinese text to bit-mapped images for printing. These utilities enable you to print Simplified Chinese characters using a Postscript-based printer that does not have Simplified Chinese fonts loaded. Some applications generate Postscript files with embedded Simplified Chinese fonts.

• The mp program reads each filename in sequence and generates a graphical representation of the content in PostScript format. The program accepts international text files of various Solaris locales and produces output which is appropriate for the specified locale. The output can contain proper text layout, bidirectional text rendering, and character shaping. Depending on each locale's system font configuration for mp, the PostScript output file can contain glyph images from Solaris system-resident scalable or bitmap fonts.

  Complex text layout (CTL) is supported in mp. For more information about Complex Text Layout, see the chapter "Complex Text Layout" in International Language Environments Guide.

• An Xprt facility that allows developers of X-windows applications to create device-independent print jobs.

• A font downloader command, fdl, that enables you to install and remove supported fonts from Postscript printers. The supported font types include: Postscript Types 1, 9 (CID Type 0), 10 (CID type 1), 11 (CID type 2), CMap files, and TrueType.