Forwarded message:
From: Self </lange>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Cyrillic
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 20:14:10
Hello, Geoff,
well, there are a lot of questions in your mail...
I just pick out some of them, and may be I will reply to others later.
I do not work with Russian texts too much, but had to solve
similar problems with the Czech language support (Central European
codepages).
>Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 23:11:13 +0000
>From: "Geoff Barnard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Cyrillic characters
>
>Also - is there any way of printing cyrillic from within Arachne -
>or am totally dependant on character sets of my printer etc?
Arachne prints text (hotkey P) first to a preview file
with the name _4PRT.TXT. This file can be viewed, edited (F4),
converted (by your own external programs), sent to a file (send it
to the printer later) or finally be sent to the printer. The
different options appear on Arachne's "Print or export page"
(the file PRINT.AH). In the end Arachne sends to the printer only
those characters that are in the preview file. Nothing more and
nothing less. You can, however, download to the printer fonts that
support your national character set. Or send commands to the
printer which initialize it in order to use the desired font. It is
important to do all this before you print the text from Arachne. If
you do something with the printer in between, than it may be
necessary, to repeat this initialization time and again.
My solution: I modified the file MIME.CFG that contains the command
for printing text:
file/printpr.dgi |@copy m:\\hplj.ini lpt1\n (line continues here)
@transfer.exe _4prt.txt lpt1 /q /o852 /r
this means:
- before each printing, the printer commands contained in hlpj.ini
are sent to the printer
- then my home-made program converts the preview file to DOS codepage
852 (Latin II) with the output to the printer
This applies to Czech text, because my laser printer has built in a
Central European codepages. It certainly supports the WINDOWS and ISO
codepages, too, but I could not find the manual. If your printer has
internal fonts for the codepage Arachne is using, the
conversion in the second step is not needed. A simple
type _4prt.txt > lpt1
in the MIME.CFG will do. On the other hand conversion can do nice
things: you may even create a transcription of Russian text into
English or Czech characters. It does not depend on the conversion
programme. My one is written in Basic (too slow for small PC and long
files), but there is a lot of conversion freeware.
If cyrillic is not supported by your printer, then you will need a
cyrillic download fonts. What printer do you use? For some
traditional models of HP or EPSON it should not be a problem to find
download fonts.
Best wishes
Christof Lange
_______________________________________________
Christof Lange
Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
phone: (+420-2) 22 78 18 00 / 22 78 20 02
fax: (+420-2) 22 78 18 01
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
