printing UTF-8 text mixed with PCL code

[Matthias Apitz]

Hello,

We ported a complex Library Management System with success from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8 (database, UNIX application servers, Java frontends, etc.). This only as a background to explain from where one leftover problem in printing comes from.

The application is punching as one of its feature small pieces of paper (A5) with (in the past) a mixture of ISO 8859-1 text describing a book (title, author etc.) and some library management information, for example the shelf number.
For reasons of the workflow in the library some of this text must be high-lighted in the printout (bold, bigger font) and some number is printed in an OCR-B font.

In the old ISO 8859-1 world this was just a mix of text with some PCL sequences to let the printer do its work correctly, i.e. switching to bold and OCR-B. Now in UTF-8 world we can print UTF-8 text to Postscript with CUPS' filter texttops, but of course we can't embed into this the PCL for the above mentioned fonts. The actual implemented solution is a fallback to ISO 8859-1 (iconv the data mix of text and PCL), but of course this can't stay this way.

We could change the application, punching the data, to produce for example HTML code with HTML-tags for bold font; or I was also thinking in producing Groff or Latex code for additional postprocessing resulting at the end in Postscript.

Any other ideas or comments?

Thanks in advance

    matthias