[tlug] Re: Mozilla printing question.

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> writes:

>>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Breen <jwb@example.com> writes:
>
>     Jim> A Mozilla question about printing Japanese text. Mozilla
>     Jim> happily shows the text on screen, displays it right in print
>     Jim> preview, but seems only to send the code-points and font
>     Jim> details to the (Postscript) printer. Since few printers in
>     Jim> this land actually have Japanese fonts installed, the results
>     Jim> are not very useful.
>
> Ghostscript will do PS to PS, but I forget the details.
>
> ps2ps may or may not do what you need it to do.  I haven't had a
> postscript printer for a while, but I seem to recall that you needed
> to tell Ghostscript to embed the fonts in the output .ps, or you just
> got "simpler and faster" spew of formatting and codepoints.  ;-)

ps2ps does what Jim wants. It is just a simple shell script 

    mfabian@example.com:~$ cat /usr/bin/ps2ps
    #!/bin/sh
    # $RCSfile: ps2ps,v $ $Revision: 1.2.2.1 $
    # "Distill" PostScript.

    OPTIONS="-dSAFER"
    while true
    do
            case "$1" in
            -*) OPTIONS="$OPTIONS $1" ;;
            *)  break ;;
            esac
            shift
    done

    if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
            echo "Usage: `basename $0` ...switches... input.ps output.ps" 1>&2
            exit 1
    fi

    exec gs -q -sDEVICE=pswrite -sOutputFile=$2 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH $OPTIONS $1
    mfabian@example.com:~$

writing to the 'pswrite' device. That seems to be all what is needed,
for example:

PostScript file using Japanese fonts:

    mfabian@example.com:/tmp$ cat arare-Ryumin-Light-H.ps
    %% -*- coding: euc-jp -*-
    /Ryumin-Light-EUC-H findfont 300 scalefont setfont
    50 200 moveto (霰) show showpage

displaying it directly with gs shows that Japanese fonts are loaded:

    mfabian@example.com:/tmp$ gs arare-Ryumin-Light-H.ps
    GNU Ghostscript 6.53 (2002-02-13)
    Copyright (C) 2002 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA. All rights reserved.
    This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file COPYING for details.
    Loading min-EUC font from /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/min.gsf... Can't find (or can't open) font file /Resource/Font/NotDefFont.
    Can't find (or can't open) font file NotDefFont.
    Substituting font Courier for NotDefFont.
    Loading NimbusMonL-Regu font from /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/n022003l.pfb... 2278032 828937 2526744 850653 0 done.
    Can't find (or can't open) font file /Resource/Font/NotDefFont.
    Can't find (or can't open) font file NotDefFont.
    Substituting font Courier for NotDefFont.
    2278032 830908 2868376 1031383 0 done.
    Loading min-70ku font from /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/min-70ku.gsf... 2338320 893503 2868376 1037603 0 done.
    >>showpage, press <return> to continue<<
    quit
    mfabian@example.com:/tmp$

converting it to pswrite:

   mfabian@example.com:/tmp$ ps2ps arare-Ryumin-Light-H.ps arare-Ryumin-Light-H.pswrite

Now Ghostscript doesn't load any fonts are loaded anymore because they
are already embedded as outline graphics:

    mfabian@example.com:/tmp$ gs arare-Ryumin-Light-H.pswrite
    GNU Ghostscript 6.53 (2002-02-13)
    Copyright (C) 2002 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA. All rights reserved.
    This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file COPYING for details.
    >>showpage, press <return> to continue<<
    quit
    mfabian@example.com:/tmp$

I.e. this can be printed on any PostScript printer.

I'm using that often because I don't have a PostScript printer with
Japanese fonts either.

Another possibility is to write the output directly to the a device
which works for your printer, e.g. ljet4 if you have a Laserjet4
printer and send the result on a raw (non-PostScript) printer queue.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。