On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Howard White <[email protected]> wrote: > We, CSS Health Technologies, do hospital software: financials, EMR, Lab. We > recently set up to print a form in Spanish and the form has all of the extra > characters loaded into it. We can see that these characters are there. But > they don't print. Now, we do all manner of gymnastics, involving PDF, in > order to deliver these forms to the printer. > > So, gentle readers, I poll your thoughts on where we should start looking > for where the accents and punctuation get stripped out of our print job. > Anybody have similar experiences?
The problem is that there are multiple ways to describe these characters. Traditionally, the method has been to use the extended character set within 8 bits to assign charactes with accents. This probably is the way that your printers are set up, given the age of the printer languages. More recently, operating systems have started supporting UTF-8, which has at least 2 ways to describe any of these combinant characters: either the canonical form or the "decomposed" form, which uses a combination of the original letter, the accent character, and a byte telling the computer to merge them together. This recombinant form, by the way, has its roots on dot-matrix printers, where, in order to print such characters, we literally inserted a backspace character into the stream to first print the main character, then print the accent on top of it. So the key, here, is to figure out in character set the printer expects it to be, and then ensure that the CUPS filter is doing the right translation between character sets. I suspect what you're doing right now is rasterization at the computer: render the document into a graphical bitstream, then print the graphic. It works, but it's suboptimal, mainly due to bandwidth concerns, especially for printers which have a high number of dots per inch. -Tilghman -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en
