printing UTF-8 text mixed with PCL code

[Helge Blischke]

Matthias Apitz wrote:

>> >> 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
>>
>> Well, when you do font handling etc. using PCL commands, that means you
>> rely on the printer's PCL interpreter.
>> As for HP printers, each printer model supports a subset of a fairly
>> large set of "character sets" which can be switched by PCL commands. So
>> for a real printer you *need* to convert the UTF-8 text "back" to the
>> appropriate character sets.
>>
> 
> We checked this. The installed set of chars in the printer is very
> limited and not usefull for printing converted UTF-8 chars. We need
> a Postscript "picture" which includes the very few big font chars
> and OCR-B chars.
> 
>     matthias

The following link may be of interest, if it is an option to upgrade the printer's firmware:
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/enterprise/downloads/Internationaldrivers.pdf

Helge