German "umlauts" missing after cups pstops conversion

[Helge Bahmann]

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

Since ghostscript cannot render it, the printer cannot print it.

I would very much appreciate any help in narrowing down the problem or finding a solution. Thanks and best regards
Helge