[Cialug] Cups printing with UTF-8 characters

[Renegade Muskrat]

Apologies in advance for any multiple copies of this; i sent it a few 
times earlier from my work account but due to still-unknown issues it 
disappeared into the aether.


I've run into an interesting printing problem. From some applications 
(such as Firefox), printing non-ASCII Unicode characters works 
perfectly. I'm guessing those applications include the necessary fonts 
as part of the print job. Some other applications do not work, however. 
If i use emacs to print a text document that contains Unicode 
characters the characters show up on the page as little squares. And if 
i pipe a text file directly to the lpr command, the Unicode characters 
show up as blank space on the printed page. Has anyone dealt with this 
type of problem and know how to resolve it?

 From Google searches i suspect that what i need is to add a filtering 
stage to cups' PostScript handling so that it looks for UTF-8 encoded 
characters and sends the appropriate font to the printer if it finds 
any. However, i don't know what program could act as that filter or how 
to integrate it with the rest of cups. My printer is a PostScript 
printer, but from what i've seen in the cups configuration files, even 
PostScript documents submitted to a PostScript printer normally get 
filtered by "pstops". I'm not sure why a PostScript to PostScript 
filter is needed in the whole cups system, but it sure would be nice if 
it could also automatically add missing fonts to a job.