[cups.general] iso-8859-1 char not printing

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On Feb 26 07:10 Willi Burmeister wrote (shortened):
> we have cups-1.3.9 installed on our Solaris 10 SPARC system
> and most things are working.
> However ...
> Lots of our files contains german ISO umlauts (äöüßÄÖÜ)
> and these are not printed.

>From the openSUSE 11.0 release notes:
------------------------------------------------------------------
Printing Legacy Encoded Text Files

The printing system based on CUPS 1.3.x ... no longer 
converts legacy encoded text files such as ISO-8859-1,
windows-1252, and Asian encodings on its own.
Only UTF-8 and thus ASCII is supported.

As a work-around to print legacy encoded text files,
convert before sending them to the CUPS server.
To print an ISO-8859-1 text file, use:

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 filename.txt | lp -d printer

Note, printing of PDF or PS or such binary files
(JPEG, PNG, etc.) works as before.


CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) and UTF-8 Encoding

Since CUPS 1.3.4 the cupsd accepts only UTF-8 encoded data.
Because this change is backward incompatible, older CUPS clients
such as CUPS 1.1 may no longer work - for example, see 
http://www.cups.org/newsgroups.php?gcups.general+T+Q%22unsupported+charset%22

Applications communicating with the cupsd such as hp-setup
or the YaST printer configuration, do no longer work if neither
a plain 7-bit ASCII nor a UTF-8 locale is used. The problem
does not occur if you use a default UTF-8 locate as
pre-configured on openSUSE since several years.
------------------------------------------------------------------

To avoid misunderstandings regarding the above
"This change is backward incompatible":

As far as I know the IPP specification the change is
compatible with the IPP specification which reads
that an IPP server needs only to support UTF-8
(which includes plain 7-bit ASCII).
Accordingly the IPP client must be prepared to fall back
to UTF-8 if the server does not support the character set
which is initially used by the client.

What is not backward compatible is that before CUPS 1.3.4
the cupsd supported several non-UTF-8 character sets
so that many clients falsely and blindly rely on support
for non-UTF-8 character sets and simply fail now
instead of falling back to UTF-8.
Therefore the root cause is that clients are not in compliance
to the IPP specification so that those clients must be fixed
(as far as I understand the IPP specification).


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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