printing UTF-8 text mixed with PCL code

[Matthias Apitz]

> Matthias Apitz wrote:
>
> > 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
>
> Well, why the conversion to PostScript at all? From your post I guess that
> formerly the "text mixed with PCL code" has been transferred to the
> printer(s) without furteher manipulation.
> Why not converting the UTF-8 text back to ISO8859-1 for printing?

Because we (and the customer) want to print not only ISO 8859-1 chars.
This (converting back to ISO) is the actual dirty fallback solution.

    matthias