German "umlauts" missing after cups pstops conversion

[Michael Sweet]

Helge Bahmann wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am using CUPS 1.2.7 (1.2.7-2 in Debian Etch); maybe there is something wrong with my setup, but I am completely clueless what to do
> 
> The printer used is a Brother DCP110C which used to work perfectly fine with CUPS until recently; Brother ships a custom CUPS filter that takes the postscript input, renders it into a temporary PPM using ghostscript and then converts it into data appropriate for the printer; I have verified that the last step works fine with any PPM I throw at it, and any PPM that is generated via gs this way.
> 
> There two problems I am experiencing, actually:
> 
> 1. The first postscript filter that CUPS applies mangles the postscript in such a way that german "Umlauts" disappear completely with certain fonts; I have put out example postscripts to show the effect.
> 
> This is the ps that is given to CUPS to print:
> http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/cupsbug/before-cups.ps
> 
> This is the ps that is then fed by CUPS into the printer filter:
> http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/cupsbug/after-cups.ps
> 
> I have put up the printer PPD as shipped by brother for reference:
> http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/cupsbug/DCP110C.ppd
> 
> Maybe there is something wrong in the PPD specification, but I just don't understand what.
> 
> I have manually inspected the generated postscript; the characters are apparently hex-encoded within, and I can see that it contains the correct "umlauts" in latin-1 encoding; maybe the problem is somehow related to http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=301119 -- but this is just a wild guess since I know nothing about postscript or ghostscript for that matter (my locale is set to de_DE.UTF-8, but changing it to C or de_DE ISO-8859-1 when viewing the generated postscript does not appear to make any difference at all)
> 
> 2. The CUPS printer test page appears to be invalid postscript, at least this is what the printer filter receives from CUPS:
> 
> http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/cupsbug/testpage.ps

Either the Debian-supplied testprint.ps is broken, or they have
another patch that is interfering - all of the prolog section is
missing.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com