[Cialug] Cups printing with UTF-8 characters

[Laith Preston]

I am sending this for Dan Ramaley as it keeps disappearing.
 >>>
Subject: Cups printing with UTF-8 characters
From: "Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley at drake.edu>
To: cialug at cialug.org
Date: 2007-01-08 11:41:17


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.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA