CUPS 1.4.3 && printing UTF-8 text

[Helge Blischke]

Matthias Apitz wrote:

> 
> Hello Helge,
> Thanks for your kind reply;
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Just to make sure, you are talking about cups-1.4.3/fonts/Monospace
> file... how can I make this visible (well, I can open it with vi, but this
> is not what I mean :-))
Use a font editor of your choice, e.g. fontforge.
> 
>>
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Interesting is that when I open the original UTF-8 text file in KDE's
> KWrite, then some of the missing glyphs are there, not all but at least
> Greek. I've place an image of KWrite screen here:
> http://www.unixarea.de/CUPS-UTF8.jpg and the original UTF-8 text file as
> well: http://www.unixarea.de/CUPS-UTF8.txt
> 
> Would it be possible to use somehow the KDE's font for CUPS?
A quick and dirty approach: put the fonts of your choice into 
/usr/share/cups/fonts and edit /usr/share/cups/data/charsets/utf-8 by 
replacing "Monospace..." by aour new fontnames. But keep in mind that these 
fonts need to be type1 or at least type42. 
AFAIK, the texttops filter cannot handle pure TrueType fonts (yet).
> Thanks
> 
>     Matthias

After all, you ill hardly find a font (free or commercial) that contains all 
the glyphs you might need - it will simply bee too big to embed.
For ypur global DB approach you will need some quite sophisticated means to 
select the needed glyphs from fomts that contain them and use subsetting for 
font downloading.

Helge