On 15 Jul 01 at 18:31, arachne-digest wrote:
>Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 02:39:38 +0200
>From: "=?iso-8859-1?q?Bj=F6rn_Ragnebrink?="
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Questions
>3) I am unable to print the swedish rho, Sigma and ÷ from within arachne,
>even though I have managed to work out how to make arachne accept
>those letters. That is I can read, and send e-mails with those
>swedish letters without a problem, but cannot print it. Also e-mails
>sent from another mailer then arachne which I receive with said
letters
>have the letters readable in the body, but the header of the mail
gets
>weird with things like "Subject: ?ISO-8859-1?BjF4rn" which should
>be "Subject:Bj÷rn"
Hi Bjorn,
Now some remarks to the character table mess. BTW: The last thing
will be readable if you use PMail as an additional e-mail client
(cf. my last mail).
As Arachne is being developed in Czech Republic and Czech
diacritical characters have always been a challenge to programmers,
the Swedish diacritics should not be a problem. BUT: it can
happen that web pages, web servers, email programs do not declare
their texts and messages correctly. Eg. I receive Czech texts
written under Windows with diacritics but people have configured
their email programs for the West European diacritics of character
table ISO-8859-1. The headers of email (not displayed by Arachne)
gives an information according to which character table the message
has been encoded.
But I understand that your main problem is printing. Not all printers
speak the same machine language, unfortunately. But there are certain
unofficial standards (BTW: the older, the better) for EPSON matrix
printer and HP laser printers. In any case it will be necessary to
look into the manual.
If you want to print diacritics, I see three ways how it can be
possible:
a) The printer fully supports the codepage
May be your printer directly supports ISO-8859-1 (= Windows 1252), ie.
you can directly send the West European national characters to it.
This would be the easiest and less probable case. There may be some
trigger at the printer that needs to be switched properly (Manual!).
b) The printer can be initialized for different codepages
The printer supports the code page after being fed with the correct
initialization code. You have to fill this (not readable) code
according to your Manual into a file and send this file to the
printer before printing text from Arachne. Then the printer will
print the national characters correctly.
If this does not work, there will be probably the possibility of
downloading an external font to your printer. That means you send a
file with a complete national alphabet to the printer's memory where
it replaces the internal font of the printer. But do not panic: this
might be necessary for Chinese or Hebrew, whereas Sweden has
always been part of Western Europe (I think). So there will certainly
be some kind of short iniatialization code.
But there is still the worst case:
c) The printer does not support your national characters at all
Then you have no choice. You need to convert the printer output. You
have to find a good conversion program (filter). You have to decide
if you need the national characters to be displayed discretely on
paper or if it will be satisfying to have them converted to simple
latin letters (ASC 7bit code). You have to think about how flexible
this conversion must be (do you like to print not only Swedish, but
Russian, too? What about Spanish texts?). And you have to answer the
questions whether it is more adequate to implant this into Arachne
or whether you rather save those texts to files and convert/print
them later.
All of this CAN be fully automatised within Arachne. It is done
by some changes in the file MIME.CFG in Arachne directory.
Have a look at mine :
file/printpr.dgi |@copy /b m:\\eplq.ini (line continues)
lpt1>nul\ni:\\i18n\\transfer.exe _4prt.txt /q /iISO2 /oCS lpt1 /r
Whenever you press the print button, Arachne automatically
performs these tasks
- it downloads a file with the Czech font to the matrix printer
- it performs my conversion program: the file _4prt with national
characters encoded in ISO-8859-2 (East European) is converted to the
good old cp437 clone of the Kamenicky brothers and the result is sent
to the printer.
Here is another one, which can replace the above
file/printpr.dgi |@i:\\i18n\\transfer.exe (line continues)
_4prt.txt /q /oASC lpt1 /r
With this mime.cfg line the program transfer.exe pauses for an input
in order to ask from what character table you want to convert. Then
it sends pure 7bit ASCII code do the printer. All accented
characters from Swedish or Czech or Spanish will be printed without
their accents. Naturally, the printer needs not to be initialised
anyway.
For the HP laser printer I use this one:
file/printpr.dgi |@copy /b m:\\hplj.ini (line continues)
lpt1\n@i:\\i18n\\transfer.exe _4prt.txt /q /o852 lpt1 /r
HPLJ.INI is a very short initialization file that just switches to
the character table pc852 (supported by HP printers sold in Czechia)
The conversion table is flexible again: Spanish characters will be
printed without accents, German and Czech characters with accents.
Transfer.exe is my own program written in an obsolete programming
language. It is very, very slow. If you want it for some testing,
send me a private mail. You will find better utilities at some of
these places:
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html
ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup
http://sizif.mf.uni-lj.si/linux/cee/iso8859-2.html#pcdos
Latin 2 Fonts
http://indy.culture.fr/ISO10646/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/
Unicode Conversion tables
http://www.unicode.org/charts/
Unicode Character Chart
http://www.cestina.cz/cestina/kodovani/unicode/
Tabulky znakov^2ch sad do Unicode
http://www.ice.ru/~vitus/catdoc/ver-0.9.html
Catdoc
http://www.w3.org/International/
W3C I18N
http://www.whizkidtech.net/i18n/
Utrans
http://www.nada.kth.se/i18n/c3/
i18n Nada
Regards
Christof Lange
________________________________________________________________
Českobratrská církev evangelická - Betlémská kaple na Žižkově
Prokopova 4/216, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
Tel. (00420-2) 22 78 06 73 / 22 78 20 02
http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
