----- Original Message -----
From: Juliusz Chroboczek <jec@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
To: Unicode List <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 1999 6:34 PM
Subject: Re: Printer that can handle Unicode fonts
> 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.
PostScript is great at handling most things away but the original request
was for a inkjet printer that would handle UNICODE. Since the MSGothic font
is 5.4Mb long and does not cover all of UNICODE we must assume that a larger
font is required. Adding 50% gets close to the CYBERBIT font. Now we have to
down load that as a type 42 into the printer. I hope the user has lots of
money as he will need to have bought lots of memory. If he is using Windows,
get Windows to rasterize the page and print that!
Martin JD Green
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:50 EDT