tlug: Printing problems again (actually, still!)

[Matthew C Gushee <matt@example.com>]

Hi, folks--

Well, I was hesitant to keep bugging everyone with this, but I don't seem to be 
able to solve the problem on my own, so . . . 

A while back I posted about not being able to print Nihongo on a PS printer. I 
had a hard disk crash, so it might take quite a while to dig up a copy of my 
original post, but the main points were:

    I have a (low-priced) postscript level II printer on /dev/lp1;
    My printer and my lpr work fine for English (ASCII or ps);
    I have canna and Japanese fonts, and can display Japanese text in
        a kterm, xemacs, and Netscape;
   When I try to print Japanese text, I just get various versions of mojibake.

So I got an answer from Craig which suggested that the printer's resident 
Japanese fonts might not be real PS fonts, and it seemed I was going to have to 
do it with Ghostscript. Haven't gotten anywhere with that yet (see below) but I 
have found out something interesting, and I wonder if anybody can suggest what 
I can do about it.

It turns out I *can* print Japanese--from Netscape. Comes out beautifully. I 
also dug up a postscript file left over from Win95 (or MS-DOG?)--a system 
resource report in Japanese. No problem.

So I examined the various postscript files, and I noticed that the ones 
produced by psconv specify kanji fonts like this: 

    /min { /Ryumin-Light-EUC-H findfont } def

whereas the ones that printed out okay have this:

    /of { /Ryumin-Light-RKSJ-H findfont exch scalefont setfont } bind def

--seems like it might have something to do with my troubles. Any ideas about 
this?

If the above isn't the key, I wonder if there's something really "obvious" that 
I don't have set up right . . . like printcap, or the locale setting--neither 
of which I understand very well?

While we're at it . . . Ghostscript . . . augh!  I installed a binary of 
Aladdin Ghostscript 5.01 and some of the Wadalab fonts, and I can get kanji 
on-screen, but no output to the printer. That's not just no kanji, I mean no 
output whatsoever. Both

    gs -dSAFER -q -sOutputFile=\|lpr foo.ps

and

    gs -dSAFER -q -sOutputFile=- foo.ps | lpr

get me a nice screen display and nothing else.

    gs -dSAFER -q -sOutputFile=bar foo.ps

doesn't do anything either. I can get an output file with

    gs -dSAFER -q -sOutputFile=- foo.ps > bar,

but all the file contains is a column of 3-digit numbers, which doesn't seem 
too likely to print out as Japanese characters. Yes, I've tried all these 
commands as root, with the filenames quoted & unquoted, etc.  I've read the 
manpage at least 6 times, but I can't see what I'm doing wrong (note that my 
printer is not specifically supported by GS, but since it's Postscript it 
should be possible to print on it, shouldn't it?).

If I can't get this &*()%$$! thing figured out soon, the men in white coats 
will have to come and take me away! I would very much appreciate any clues 
anyone can offer.

Matt Gushee
Oshamanbe, Hokkaido


Next TLUG meeting is Saturday Dec. 13, 1997  (possibly Nov. 13?)
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