Re: Printing Japanese

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> Well, I've got gs displaying and printing Japanese with
    Craig> this script:
[snip]
    Craig> Fonts are a little grainy.  Is there a way to get better
    Craig> fonts?  I'm using the Wadalab mincho 8 set.  They are

Mincho 12 is better.  You may have the resolution set improperly in
Ghostscript; the lj4 should handle 600x600, no?  But I think this is a
limitation of the fonts; they're pretty buggy, besides being grainy.
You can buy Postscript fonts from Adobe, of course, and other
foundries.

What would be nice is a Postscript-to-Postscript filter.  This might
improve things.

It's possible, for example, to get dvips (yes, dvipsk 5.58f does
kanji, at least in NTT JTeX) to preload the font files, and then you
could just send that Postscript to your printer.  I haven't done it
(as mentioned elsewhere) because my Postscript printer only
understands level 1.

I think Peter Deutsch once told me how to do this with Ghostscript,
but I can't find the message now.

    Craig> readable, but not as good as something printed from Windows
    Craig> '95-J.  I think there is some way to use the MS TrueType
    Craig> fonts, but I'm concentrating on getting my lpd to work
    Craig> before fixing the aesthetics of the fonts.

I wouldn't bet on it.  Yes, you can use TT fonts in theory (the
facility is called a "Type 42 wrapper" in Postscript) but you need to
deal properly with the execrable Shift-JIS codes.  I don't know if the
encoding for TT kanji fonts is well-known.  Also, you would need to
know how the encoding is done in the TT fonts, which is not
necessarily compatible with Postscript Type 0.  Given all that I
suspect that using TT fonts is more trouble than it's been worth to
anybody so far.

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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