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Since Postscript itself does not support Unicode fonts, the burden of
Unicode support in printing is on the program creating the Postscript
document, not on the Postscript renderer.
The existing Postscript fonts I've seen - .pfa/.pfb/.afm/.pfm/.gsf -
support only a small range of glyphs and are not Unicode fonts.
Both the uniprint and wprint programs produce good printed output
for Unicode plain text. They require a TrueType font; see section
"TrueType fonts" above. The Bitstream Cyberbit gives good results.
uniprint
The "uniprint" program contained in the yudit package can convert a text
file to Postscript. For uniprint to find the Cyberbit font, symlink it to
/usr/local/share/yudit/data/cyberbit.ttf .
wprint
The "wprint" (WorldPrint) program by Eduardo Trapani
http://ttt.esperanto.org.uy/programoj/angle/wprint.html
postprocesses Postscript output produced by Netscape Communicator or Mozilla
from HTML pages or plain text files.
The output is nearly perfect; only in Cyrillic paragraphs the line breaking
is incorrect: the lines are only about half as wide as they should be.
Comparison
For plain text, uniprint has a better overall layout. On the other hand,
only wprint gets Thai output correct.
Generally, printing using fixed-size fonts does not give an as professional
output as using TrueType fonts.
txtbdf2ps
The txtbdf2ps 0.7 program by Serge Winitzki
http://members.linuxstart.com/~winitzki/txtbdf2ps.html
converts a plain text file to Postscript, by use of a BDF font.
Installation:
# install -m 777 txtbdf2ps-dev.txt /usr/local/bin/txtbdf2ps
Example with a proportional font:
$ txtbdf2ps -BDF=cyberbit.bdf -UTF-8 -nowrap < input.txt > output.ps
Example with a fixed-width font:
$ txtbdf2ps -BDF=unifont.bdf -UTF-8 -nowrap < input.txt > output.ps
Note: txtbdf2ps does not support combining characters and bidi.
Another way to print with TrueType fonts is to convert the TrueType font to
a Postscript font using the ttf2pt1 utility
(
http://www.netspace.net.au/~mheath/ttf2pt1/,
http://quadrant.netspace.net.au/ttf2pt1/,
http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net/). Details can be
found in Julius Chroboczek's "Printing with TrueType fonts in Unix" writeup,
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jec/programs/xfsft/printing.html.
TeX, Omega
TODO: CJK, metafont, omega, dvips, odvips, utf8-tex-0.1
DocBook
TODO: db2ps, jadetex
groff -Tps
"groff -Tps" produces Postscript output. Its Postscript output driver
supports only a very limited number of Unicode characters (only what
Postscript supports by itself).
Netscape's "Print..."
As of version 4.72, Netscape Communicator cannot correctly print HTML
pages in UTF-8 encoding. You really have to use wprint.
Mozilla's "Print..."
As of version M16, printing of HTML pages is apparently not implemented.
html2ps
As of version 1.0b1, the html2ps HTML to Postscript converter does not support
UTF-8 encoded HTML pages and has no special treatment of fonts: the generated
Postscript uses the standard Postscript fonts.
a2ps
As of version 4.12, a2ps doesn't support printing UTF-8 encoded text.
enscript
As of version 1.6.1, enscript doesn't support printing UTF-8 encoded text.
By default, it uses only the standard Postscript fonts, but it can also
include a custom Postscript font in the output.
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