[cups.general] cups-1.4.3 && printing ISO-8859-1 text files

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Fri Oct 15 08:25:40 PDT 2010


On Oct 15, 2010, at 12:45 AM, Matthias Apitz wrote:

> 
> Hello,
> 
> Using the above cups version 1.4.3 compiled from source I don't see how to
> print ISO-8859-1 text files directly:
> 
> $ file /tmp/olis.txt
> /tmp/olis.txt: ISO-8859 text
> $ LANG=es_ES.ISO8859-1 lpr -Ppdf /tmp/olis.txt
> 
> starts the filter 'texttops' with CHARSET=utf-8 environment. I see no way to
> change CHARSET to something else, i.e. this is the 1st question:
> 
> How I could influence CHARSET for the filter from the frontend command?

You can't.  Only UTF-8 text files are supported in 1.4.x and beyond.

> Even if I could set CHARSET to something else, a look into the source
> filter/texttops.c shows that only utf-8 is really supported in 1.4.3. I
> checked an older version (1.1.20) and there it seems was support for other

Yes, old versions of CUPS did attempt to support multiple character sets. In practice, however, this did not work since CUPS didn't do charset mapping for different clients.  The result was a lot of I18N issues that were not solved until we switched to UTF-8 for the scheduler environment.

Since there is no clean way to identify the encoding of a particular plain text file (even using the locale info will be wrong much of the time), we dropped multiple-charset support in the text filter.

________________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair








More information about the cups mailing list