CUPS 1.4.3 && printing UTF-8 text

[Helge Blischke]

Matthias Apitz wrote:

> 
>> ...
>> So your "Griechisch" line says:  α ρ ι σ ι ο ύ κ α ι τ α πε ρ ί χ ω ρ α κ
>> α ι β ρ ί σ κ ε τ α ι σ ε έ ν α λ
>>
>> but the included "Monospace" font only knows the glyph for "π"
>>
> 
> yes; a copy&paste from Evince to KDE's KEdit shows the same;
> 
>> ...
>> > 2) Is there some good documentation which addresses the thematic: CUPS
>> > / UTF-8 / fonts?
>> >
>> I think this is not a CUPS-problem.
>>
> 
> yes & no; my understanding is that CUPS from the UTF-8 text file is
> producing some PostScript code (filter texttops) and the CUPS-PDF backend
> translates this to PDF using Ghostscript; wrong?
> 
> so it is something of this pipe which included the above mentioned
> "Monospace", which itself maybe wrong and sits outside of CUPS in the
> system environment (of X11?);
> 
> in any case a good documentation should address such issues and explain
> how to solve UTF-8 related printing/font issues; in any case, thanks for
> your feedback;
> 
>       Matthias

The Monospace font family (originally licensed from Bitstream) is part of 
the CUPS 1.4.x distribution (short of Mac OS X, I guess). A first glance at 
one of these fonts (Monospace, the plain style font) shows that the glyph 
collection seems to cover (nearly?) all latin based scripts, including 
cyrillic, but lacks greek and the more exotic ones, especially the asian 
ones.

You will need to get (buy?) a full featured monospaced font and probably 
modify the texttops filter to handle that fon(s) if it is not a plain type1 
font.

Helge