Re: [tlug] CJK Printing from Web Browsers in Debian 3.3.2

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 04/11/06, Bart Mathias <mathias@example.com> wrote:

> I went ahead and ran the suggested commands without studying their man
> pages; I prefer to know what I'm doing, but these look like a long
> study.  I've never really understood how "Abracadabra" works either.

Nah, they're pretty straight-forward. ;)

> When they didn't work--Thunderbird printed squares on a test--and the
> Firefox and Mozilla prefs still looked fairly different when I opened them
> side by side (Mozilla still prints Japanese OK), I shut all Mozilla
> stuff down again and ran just the
>
> sed -i.bak -e 's|^\(.\+intl.\+\)$|// \1|'
> .mozilla/firefox/ucf0ouei.default/prefs.js
>
> command again, and took another look at the file.  It reported a
> last-modified time the same as when I ran the command, but nothing in
> the file looks commented out.

Odd. Obviously I have an error in the sed expression somewhere. Even
though I tested it... WTF?

Oh yeah, I figured it out. My Firefox config file did not have any
"print" settings, so I changed the string to "intl" for testing
purposes (never give instructions on a mailing list without testing
them, or Murphy[1]'ll have yer bollucks for breakfast!), and forgot to
change it back.

Try this instead:

sed -i.bak -e 's|^\(.\+print.\+\)$|// \1|'
.mozilla/firefox/ucf0ouei.default/prefs.js

And then the rest of the stuff as I have it.

> So I went "man sed" after all, and now I
> understand everything in that command except the minor
> 's|^\(.\+intl.\+\)$|// \1|' part.

That is the same as saying: 's/^\(.\+intl.\+\)$/\/\/ \1/', if that
helps any. If it doesn't, what that line does is as follows:

1. The single quotes prevent the shell from trying to interpret the expression.
2. The "s" at the beginning of the expression tells sed to expect a
substitution.
3. The "|" starts the match part of the substitution regex. Like I
said, I could have used a "/" instead, but then I would have had to
escape the literal "//" later in the expression--a sickness known as
Leaning Toothpick Syndrome[1] in The Biz.
4. The "^" character matches the beginning of a line--it is known as
an "anchor" in regex parlance.[2]
5. The "\(" starts a grouping, which sed(1) will remember.
6. The "." matches one of any character (except End-Of-Line--EOL).
7. The "\+" means: match *one* or more of the previous thing; taken
together with (6), it means: match one of more of anything.
8. The "intl" is a literal, and means: match the characters "intl", in
that order.
9. The ".\+" you should now recognise from (6) and (7).
10. The "\)" closes the grouping started in (5).
11. The "$" matches the EOL (End-Of-Line) character, which on Unix is
'\n', and on Windows (and maybe Mac?) is "\r\n".
12. The "|" ends the match portion of the substitution expression. So
far, we have instructed sed thusly: match all characters in any line
containing the literal string "intl", and remember everything between
the beginning and end of the line. The stuff coming after the "|"
character that we just wrote and the next one is what to replace that
with.
13. "// " is a literal string.
14. "\1" is a backreference, which refers the the first group matched
(and saved) in the match portion of the expression. In this case, the
entire line containing the string "intl".
15. The last "|" terminates the expression and tells sed to do its worst.

The result of all of this is that sed should transform lines like:

user_pref("intl.charset.default", "UTF-8");
user_pref("intl.charset.detector", "ja_parallel_state_machine");
user_pref("intl.charsetmenu.browser.cache", "ISO-8859-1, UTF-8,
Shift_JIS, us-ascii, EUC-JP");

into:

// user_pref("intl.charset.default", "UTF-8");
// user_pref("intl.charset.detector", "ja_parallel_state_machine");
// user_pref("intl.charsetmenu.browser.cache", "ISO-8859-1, UTF-8,
Shift_JIS, us-ascii, EUC-JP");

> Then I tried setting up a user.js file in Thunderbird, copying in all of
> the "...print..." lines from Mozilla's prefs file, hoping it would override
> Thunderbird's prefs, but that didn't work either.

Yeah, if you want to do it by hand, you need to comment out all lines
containing "print" by placing a "//" at the beginning of the line,
*then* add your settings from Mozilla.

> > BTW, the kprinter trick will only work if you use KDE (or have it
> > installed) and KDE apps print Japanese correctly. Otherwise, just use
> >  plain ol' lpr.
>
> I do use KDE.  A couple of years ago I was having some kind of trouble
> printing which regularly changing "lpr ${<whatever>}" to just "kprinter"
> cured, but I don't remember details (those last four words have become
> the story of my life).

kprinter adds a little special sauce of its own to the CUPS o'
steaming shite that is printing.

> Thanks for trying.  Computers is weird.

Yeah, now I'm *re*-trying. Lemme know how it goes.

Cheers,
Josh

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_Law
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_toothpick_syndrome
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expressions