Bien wrote on 2001-04-16 18:06 UTC:
> Hi all !
> I have a UTF-8 text file , Can I print it under Linux (without yudit or
> uniprint)
This depends a lot on what character repertoire you want to print out.
Unfortunately, there is no really good and simple solution available
yet that I know of.
- We don't know yet of any printer that accepts UTF-8 plaintext
directly (like HPs do e.g. with various 8-bit encodings).
Perhaps it is time to make such a suggestion to various printer
firmware developers, but they might not be too interested, as 99%
of all printing is done today anyway via some device driver in
the OS and not any more by dumping plaintext files onto the printer.
The fonts build into printers today usually cover only a tiny part
of UCS anyway (mostly European ISO 8859 and CPs).
- The most universal and at the same time the most ugly approach is
to use the lowres BDF bitmap fonts that come with XFree86 directly.
One tool for doing this is txtbdf2ps by Serge Winitzki (in Perl).
Used to be on http://www.linuxstart.com/~winitzki/txtbdf2ps.html
but seems to have moved elsewhere. Just found a copy at
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/5735/1/txtbdf2ps-dev.txt
Try this with 10x20.bdf.
- We also have to think about extending standard plain-text to
Postscript filters such as a2ps. There are two approaches:
a) upload a comprehensive Unicode Type1 or TrueType font to
the printer and use it's glyphs
b) use only the standard Postscript characters and graphic
primitives and offer the largest UCS repertoire that can
be plugged together this way (i.e., almost all Latin and block
graphics characters, a repertoire very similar to what all the
Adobe and B&H BDF fonts offer under XFree86 4.1 now)
I have started to write a support library to do b) in any program
that generates PostScript, but it is not yet released and I won't
have the time to make big progress in the next 3 months.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
