Abel Cheung wrote:
I have also tried using ooffice -p (2.0); actually it doesn't work well with cjk characters, with characters overlapping each other; but at least all the characters do print successfully.
Hmm.. I did not see these "overlapping" CJK characters. I wonder when and why this happens.
The best one I can find to handle cjk characters well is u2ps, which utilizes pango for font rendering. It is basically a replacement of a2ps that can recognize unicode, with Arabic BiDi support; though kde users may not like it too much :-)
Yes, because you must have Gnome; so far I have avoided installing both KDE and Gnome, and would prefer to go on avoiding them. But the "paps" program mentioned by Thomas Wolff (which also uses pango) is really excellent! It is much better than my original suggestion (openoffice). You just have to experiment with the options: with the set of fonts that I have installed, it works best when called as paps --family "Courier New" --font_scale 10 (it is a filter, using stdin for input and stdout for output). This can be used as a "drop in" replacement for a2ps in lpd filters (you cannot do this with openoffice, because of permission problems). And unlike openoffice, it works on the console (does not need X). I can now just call lpr mytest.txt where mytest.txt is a multilingual UTF-8 file, and get a very nice print. This is amazing. I wonder why paps hasn't yet been picked up by the major distributions, so "ordinary users" could install it without having to compile. The only problem I found so far is that the spacing between characters is a little bit too big. Boxes drawn with "box draw characters" have small gaps in them. paps selects fonts using fontconfig which I do not understand at all. I would like to have some "fine control" about which font is used for which Unicode range of characters. Does anyone know which config file on Linux can be used for this? Regards, Jan -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
