Swedish characters in postscript files printing as space

Helge Blischke h.blischke at acm.org
Mon Feb 14 05:08:16 PST 2011


Nigel Bennington wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've analysed the document, and the only fonts used in it are Courier,
> Times-Roman and Times-Bold, all of which are installed in the printer.
> Times-Bold is in force when the swedish characters are invoked.
> 
> When we were on Solaris 8, using the base solaris printing, these
> documents printed fine, to the same printers - Is there any processing
> involved in printing a ps file with CUPS, or is it just passed directly to
> the printer? I note there is a pstops filter in 1.4.5, and in 1.1.21, the
> PPD invoked foomatics-rip. Could this be where the issue lies?
> 
> In case I haven't already said by the way, many, many thanks for the
> assistance.
> 
> Cheers,
>> Nigel Bennington wrote:
>>
>> > Actually, they are coded using ISO8859P1, which should be OK, and I
>> > thought UTF-8 was the font CUPS preferred? It certainly seems to be the
>> > default in everything I've read. Any hints on how to tell CUPS what
>> > character set encoding is in use?
>> >
>> > Bear in mind that the PS files are produced by a third party app, and
>> > woked fine on Solaris 8, using standard SUN printing, it;'s only since
>> > moving to Solaris 10 and CUPS that the issue has begun.
>> >
[...]
>>
>> Well, only when printing plain text and friends (all the document formats
>> defined as text/xxxx in mime.types) cups requires UTF-8 encoding.
>>
>> Postscript and PDF are onother story, the text encoding in PS or PDF
>> files is completely independent of cups requirements for plain text.
>>
>> So if you retain the original encoding (ISO8859P1), it should be OK, but
>> you still need to reencode the fonts (short of Symbol) from their native
>> encoding to IsoLatn1Encoding and embed the fonts (except if this is the
>> nat native encoding of the fonts installed in the printer(s).
>>
>> Helge
>>
>>

First, as I stated before, you need to revert to ISO8849 encoding of your 
text strings in the PostScript job(s).

Second, could you please tell the make and model of the printer(s) you use 
and how it was configured under Solaris 8?

As the only Solaris I have access to is OpenSolaris 2009.6 (roughly 
equivalent to Solaris 11), I have only limited opportunities to replicate 
your issues here.

Helge





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