CUPS 1.4.3 && printing UTF-8 text

[Matthias Apitz]

> Matthias Apitz wrote:
>
> > The not embedded font files must be somehow the result of a missing PPD
> > file information if I call 'texttops' for testing this way:
> >
> > # CHARSET=utf-8 ~/cups-1.4.3/filter/texttops 1 rleigh myfile 1 ""
> > # ~/CUPS-UTF8.txt �> /tmp/ps
> > DEBUG: ppd = SetCommonOptions(num_options 0, options 0, 1) gives 0
> > DEBUG: ppd arg of WriteProlog() 0?
> > DEBUG: charset file /usr/local//share/cups/charsets/utf-8
> > DEBUG: NumFonts 15
> > DEBUG: Download fonts 2?
> > DEBUG: Download fonts ppd 0?
> > DEBUG: Download fonts ppd 0?
> >
> > (I inserted some more DEBUG statements to see what it is missing).
> >
> > I don't know what I should provide exactly as PPD information, even after
> > reading for a while the docs :-(
> >
>
> Fonts get embedded in the PS file by using the PPD env variable, like
>
> # CHARSET=utf-8 PPD=/usr/local/etc/cups/ppd/pdf.ppd ~/cups-1.4.3/filter/texttops 1 rleigh myfile 1 "" ~/CUPS-UTF8.txt  > /tmp/ps
>

Hello,

With the existing (and added in our CUPS installation) FreeFonts, we are printing happy UTF-8 text files (even if there are still missing a lot of glyphs and the subject in general needs more attention in the future);

one problem is showing up in production environment:

the resulting Postscript output which is sent to the printer is because of the embedded FreeFonts around 1 Mbyte for a simple text page and the printer has to interprete this bunch of data; it takes on a normal HP Laserjet 205 seconds for 10 print jobs of each 1 MByte data, i.e. an average of 20 secs for a page;

I tested the following:

1. used texttops to convert the UTF-8 text to Postscript as shown above
2. convert the Postscript file to PCL with:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=ljet4 -sOutputFile=file.pcl -sPAPERSIZE=a4 file.ps
3. print the resulting PCL file with -o raw via CUPS;

the result is promising:
- the file is only 200 KByte for a page
- it takes 55 secs to print 10 files

Comments?
Is there some work in progress to integrate CUPS and Ghostscript in that way?

Thanks

     matthias