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

[Matthias Apitz]

El día Wednesday, March 11, 2015 a las 09:50:11AM +0100, Johannes Meixner escribió:

> 
> Hello,
> 
> On Mar 11 08:45 Matthias Apitz wrote (excerpt):
> > Re/ fonts too big: we stumpled over this already while using the
> > FreeFonts with texttops of CUPS 1.4.3; this is not only a problem for
> > the printers itself, but as well for the transfer and interpretion time
> > of the resulting Postscript file; with the FreeFonts embedded in the
> > Postscript file any printout of a few UTF-8 text results in around 1
> > MByte Postscript file size;
> 
> Perhaps a stupid question:
> Is 1 MByte PostScript file size because of an embeeded big font
> really an issue on nowadays PostScript printers?
> (My cheap PostScript printer at home has more than 100 MB memory.)

Yes, it is an issue. A 1 MByte PostScript takes around 20 secs to
transfer to the remote socket and to print, a PCL file 1-2 secs. You
may say, 20 secs, so what? But if you have to print in a library system
4-6000 pages at once (because they must come out in the logical order of
the books in the magazine store), it does matter.

> > we handcrafted a workaround by rastering the
> > Postscript to PCL5 with ghostscript before sending it to the printer.
> > It would be nice if this could be done as an option by text2ps too on
> > the fly.
> 
> A filter progran that converts text into PostScript must
> always output PostScript and nothing else because the
> CUPS filtering system cannot deal with filters that
> output different formats.
> 
> If the PostScript output from text2ps chould be converted
> into any other format it is usually done by a subsequent
> separated filter (e.g. something like a "ps2pcl5e").

> If text input should be converted into PCL5e this could also
> be done by a single filter (e.g. text2pcl5) that converts text
> into PCL5e but then there is the drawback that any text input

Some text2pcl5 would be fine if this could deal with UTF-8 of all
European language glyphs.

	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.