Something that those of you planning to extend a2ps and similar
something-to-postscript filter software for UTF-8 support might find
worth a quick look:

I experimented over a year ago with ways of how software such as ap2s
could make best-effort use of the standard postscript fonts. The goal
was to print a Latin Unicode subset that covers CP 1252, most of MES-1,
plus a couple of more characters that will be of use for Latin users.
Quite a lot can be achieved by creative use of existing Postscript
standard font glyphs!

Software:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf2ps.c

Example output:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf2ps.ps

Admittedly, this is definitely not an i18n solution and not scalable to
the requirements of many users, but I think it is a very useful
better-than-Latin-1-only solution that is very easy to use as it does
not require installation of any additional fonts. This approach is aimed
at tools that

  - support only Latin-1 today
  - where Latin users prefer not to bother with the fuzz involved with
    switching to new fonts

WARNING: THIS IS MERELY EXPERIMENTAL PROOF-OF-CONCEPT SOFTWARE. It is
not engineered yet to be used directly as a printing libraray, but feel
free to do with it what you want.

I have at the moment no time to continue with it and therefore happily
put it in the PUBLIC DOMAIN in the hope that someone will pick it up and
include something like it into a2ps, enscript, netscape, etc. or turn it
into a proper reuseable Postscript Unicode string output library.

Cheers,

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/linux-utf8/

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