[tlug] CJK Printing from Web Browsers in Debian 3.3.2

[Bart Mathias <mathias@example.com>]

I can't print CJK text from Thunderbird or Firefox.  I read "CJK 
Printing from Web Browsers in Centos 4.2," a thread from last November 
about a similar problem with great interest, but I still can't do it.

It isn't a major problem.  Like a couple of the respondents, I don't 
have much call to print such material, and when I do need to, I too can 
cut and paste to OpenOffice, or even more quickly, to KEdit, and print 
thence.  It's just, so to speak, the principal of the thing that bugs me.

I used to use Mozilla Suite.  No trouble printing CJK text.  But in 
those days, Mozilla crashed a *lot* (turned out to be a heat problem, 
which I have fixed), so I switched to Thunderbird and Firefox, which 
were considerably more stable until mid-summer.  One day I tried 
printing a post from sci.lang.japan in Thunderbird.  Squares where 
Japanese characters should be.  Everything fine, of course, on screen 
and in Print Preview.

Recently I trashed all my Mozilla stuff in a freak accident.  When I 
reinstalled Thunderbird and Firefox, Mozilla Suite came along for the 
ride (apparently Firefox always ends up in ~/.mozilla?), but I never 
looked at it until yesterday, after trying some of the suggestions in 
last November's thread.  I first took a look at prefs.js, and was 
surprised to find that it contained only about four lines, none of 
particular interest to my problem.  Nevertheless, I ran the browser, 
Googled ææè and printed the top of the resultant page.  It printed in 
Japanese script.  Then when I looked at prefs.js again, it was full of 
"user_pref" stuff, including

user_pref("print.printer_PostScript/LC24-100.print_command", "lpr 
${MOZ_PRINTER_NAME:+'-P'}${MOZ_PRINTER_NAME}");

This was odd, because the OP of last November's thread had solved his 
problem by changing the "lpr" in that to "kprinter."  I had already 
tried that suggestion, and it didn't work.

Thunderbird has just "kprinter" without the ${MOZ_ ... stuff.

(The file heading has "* To make a manual change to preferences, you can 
visit the URL about:config," apparently forgetting that Thunderbird 
isn't a browser.  Or can one visit URLs from a mail reader?)

I've gone on way too long for my first post to this group, but I'm kind 
of hoping someone will be fascinated by the problem and want to dig into 
it a bit.

Bart Mathias