[iyonix-support] Re: Unicode and printing was Netsurf...

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Chris Evans wrote:

> Thanks John for the clear explanation, this raises for me the questions:
> Is there any app that can print using Unicode?

Unicode information may be encoded in a number of different forms. The 
most common are UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. Printing of UTF-8 encoded text 
generally works (as it's an 8bit encoding, backwards compatible with 
ASCII, so the printer drivers require no modification to work with it).
Printing of UTF-16 or UTF-32 encoded text requires modifications to the 
printer drivers.

Therefore, anything that prints UTF-8 encoded text will generally be fine
(but see the next paragraph).

Just to add a little more confusion, when selecting fonts for use, you may 
specify a "font encoding". This defines the mapping between character 
codes and the glyphs that represent them (e.g. to map the character code 
&65 to the glyph that looks like a letter 'a'). One of these encodings is 
UTF8. If you use this, then printing to a PostScript printer will not work 
as the encoding information is dumped straight into the output stream. 
Unfortunately, the UTF8 font encoding information is not valid PostScript 
data.

> What other apps use Unicode? Oregano2?

Oregano2 uses UTF-16 internally (to the best of my knowledge). However, it 
doesn't use the RISC OS font manager, and it prints by rendering to a 
sprite and then printing the sprite.

Recent versions of Zap are capable of editing UTF-8 text properly. I've no 
idea about printing things.

So, not very many, which is probably why a fix for this printing issue 
hasn't happened yet.


John.
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