DP> Can anyone recommend a decent inkjet that he/she knows won't have
DP> this problem?
Depends what software you're using to drive your printer.
A driver may chose to break a host's font into a number of eight-bit
fonts; this way, Unicode fonts should work on any printer that can
download fonts. You may need to fiddle with your driver settings to
achieve this.
A driver may also chose not to use fonts at all, but just to send a
raster image of the page to the printer. This will allow you to print
arbitrary fonts on any printer with support for graphics, but will
require a thick cable between your machine and the printer.
The proper way is to use a Page Description Language that has direct
support for 16-bit (or more?) fonts. PostScript supports multibyte
fonts in two different ways: Type 0 (``composite'') fonts on all Level
2 interpreters and East-Asian versions of Level 1, and the (more
efficient) CIDFont fonrmat starting with version 2013 (``Level 2, 13th
release of the Adobe interpreter''; this is pretty old by now, so all
recent PostScript printers should support CIDFonts).
I suspect that the discrepancy between the Deskjet and the Laserjet is
that you run the Laserjet in PS while the Deskjet is run in PCL, and
the Laserjet probably has CIDFont support.
Note that a TrueType font may also be downloaded as a CIDFont using
the Type 42 format. Assuming that you use Windows, and that the PS
drivers in Windows can generate CIDFonts (can anyone confirm this?),
you should be pretty safe with any Level 2 PostScript printer
(e.g. the Laserjet 5MP.) A wee program to determine the exact version
of your PostScript interpreter is available from
ftp://ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pub/jec/programs/info.ps
Sincerely,
J.
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