[cups] cups 2.0.2 / cups-filters-1.0.62 && printing UTF-8 text files

[Helge Blischke]

I’m – currently not with too much effort – doing a redesign of the txttops filter
which implements a direct UTF8 text rendering in PostScript using the 
GNU FreeFont (see www.gnu.org/software/freefont <http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont> for details and supported
writing systems).
Currently, I’m thinking about how to rewrite the current texttops’ syntax
handling (e.g. by incorporating the vim syntax files). 
But, if you badly need a solution, I could push up a „beta version“ without
the syntax gimmicks in about two weeks or so. Let me know if that would be
a solution for you.
The technical requirements are a Perl interpreter (5.8.3 or newer) and a fairly
recent version of Ghostscript (for font subsetting, as the complete GNU FreeFont is  
fairly large).

Helge

> Am 12.02.2015 um 10:14 schrieb Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de>:
> 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> At the moment we are using in production environment cups 1.4.3 together
> with some special font files and 'texttops' which makes use of them to
> produce Postscript printouts of not all, but sufficient European and some
> other languages.
> 
> I'm on the way to prepare an update to a more recent version and have
> ported cups-2.0.2 and cups-filters-1.0.62 to one of our Linux SLES 11
> hosts here.
> 
> Btw: This took some time because the latter (cups-filters-1.0.62) is only
> happy with a very recent GCC version, you need at least GCC-4.7 (I used
> 4.9).
> 
> I have now both running and after solving a bug in lib/cups/filter/texttops
> it is now willing to print at least some text files. I have here a PDF
> scan to show which UTF-8 codepoints are printable via 'texttopdf ...'
> pipe line, or better which are not:
> 
> http://www.unixarea.de/SOH-1-2-MF15021209520.pdf
> 
> 
> The bug in lib/cups/filter/texttops is simple (and yes I know, it is
> depreciated, but at least it should work if it is delivered). See below.
> 
> Saying 'depreciated' is fine, but what is now the supposed way to print
> UTF-8 text files or is that no longer scope of CUPS or cups-filters and
> we should move to something like Pango to render UTF-8 text to
> Postscript or PDF?
> 
> Thanks for any pointer.
> 
> 	matthias
> 
> 
> # diff /usr/local/cups/lib/cups/filter/texttops*
> 22c22
> < PDF2PS=`which pdftops`
> ---
>> PDF2PS=`which pdf2ps`
> 37c37
> < `dirname $0`/texttopdf "$1" "$2" "$3" "$4" "$5" | $PDF2PS - - - - -
> ---
>> `dirname $0`/texttopdf "$1" "$2" "$3" "$4" "$5" | $PDF2PS - -
> 
> 
> Vy 73
> 
>         matthias
> 
> -- 
> Matthias Apitz, guru at unixarea.de, http://www.unixarea.de/ +49-170-4527211
> La referencia de la Duma a la anexión de la RDA, en este caso al contrario con la Crimlía sin
> referéndum, no solamente tiene gracia sino da en el blanco.- 
> Marinos Yannikos @MarinosYannikos en un blog de RTdeutsch.
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