Generic Question about cups and printing

[Michael Sweet]

none wrote:
> 
> (Please pardon me if this sounds newbieish)
> 
> When printing in general its working for me out of the box
> except for a few small details:
> 
> The fonts never quite look like the ones I'm trying to
> use. Sometimes, I get blocks when printing Japanese and always
> when printing Vietnamese text. I'm not looking for any specific
> advice,  but in general, my questions are:
> 
> 
> 1. Does everything have to go through postscript?
>   (postscript always seems to have trouble with encodings)

No, MacOS X uses PDF for most of its printing (except for a
few apps that use the legacy print APIs, like Illustrator,
Quark, etc.) and does not have this problem.

The encodings aren't usually the issue, but rather the fonts
themselves.

> 2. Are there a completely different set of fonts used for
>    printing than the ones that I use for onscreen viewing?

Depends on which OS, but for most UNIX/Linux OS's the answer
is yes.  This is slowly changing as Xft/FreeType gains more
usage on desktop apps.

> 3. If the above two are answered in the affirmative, I would
>    wonder if there are any plans to unify font handling for
>    onscreen display and printing and hopefully to cut postscript
>    out of the loop entirely...

Again, PostScript isn't the problem, just the fonts.  Apps that
embed the fonts they use should print characters correctly
unless the PostScript interpreter has a problem with them.

> 4. My goal is to be able to print an html document encoded in
>    utf-8 containing English, Japanese, and Vietnamese text.
>    Is this a pipe-dream under cups?

Not at all, but you'll need a browser that produces the right
PS/PDF output to get it to print correctly.

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