Traditional Chinese Printing Facilities

The Traditional Chinese Solaris operating environment supports printing Traditional Chinese output through the following types of printing facilities:

• Line printer containing built-in Traditional Chinese fonts

• PostScript-based printer

Note - Before you can print Traditional Chinese text, a system administrator must set up your printing support as described in Traditional Chinese Solaris System Administrator's Guide.

You can use the Asian Solaris xetops, xutops or mp utilities to print files containing Traditional Chinese text on a PostScript printer, regardless of other printing support.

These printing facilities can be used directly from a command line or from within Traditional Chinese Solaris applications as discussed in the following sections.

Printing From a Command Line

From a command line, you can print one of two ways:

• Directly to a line printer.

• Using the xetops, xutops or mp utilities to convert text to bitmapped graphics.

Printing With a Line Printer

The Traditional Chinese Solaris operating environment uses EUC code sets. Its printing applications (such as desktop tools) generate PostScript code that uses EUC. If you use different PostScript printing, make sure it has the same capabilities.

• To print an EUC file, use the following command:

  system% lp EUC-filename

  
  

• To print a Big5 format file on a printer that supports this format, use the following command:

  system% lp -d Big5_printer Big5-filename

  
  

  For more information on setting up the Big5 filter, see Traditional Chinese Solaris System Administrator's Guide.

• To print a file that contains Traditional Chinese characters in EUC format on an Epson® dot matrix printer, use the following command:

  system% lp -d Epson_printer EUC-filename

  
  

  For more information on setting up the filter for dot matrix printers, see Traditional Chinese Solaris System Administrator's Guide.

Printing With the xetops Utility

The xetops utility allows you to print Traditional Chinese characters using a PostScript-based printer in zh_TW, zh_TW.BIG5 or zh_HK.BIG5HK locales. The utility converts Traditional Chinese text into a bitmapped graphics printed image.

A typical command line for printing a file containing Traditional Chinese characters, with or without ASCII/English characters, would be as follows:

system% pr filename | xetops | lp 

The file may contain ASCII/English characters as well as Traditional Chinese. Refer to the xetops(1) man page for more detailed information.

Printing With the xutops Utility

The xutops utility allows you to print Traditional Chinese characters in both zh_TW.UTF-8 and zh_HK.UTF-8 locale using a PostScript-based printer. The utility converts Traditional Chinese text into a bitmapped graphics printed image.

Note - Starting with the next release of the Solaris environment, xetops and xutops utilities may no longer be supported.

A typical command line for printing a file containing Traditional Chinese characters, with or without ASCII/English characters, would be as follows:

system%  filename | xutops | lp -d printer

The file may contain ASCII/English characters as well as Traditional Chinese. Refer to the xutops(1) man page for more detailed information.

Printing with the mp Utility

As a print filter, mp generates a pretitified version of contents in PostScript format. The PostScript output file contains glyph images from Solaris-resident scalable or bitmap fonts, depending on each locale's system font configuration for mp. Now it is enhanced in the Solaris 9 environment to print files with different encoding text in corresponding asian locales.

A typical command line for printing a file containing Traditional Chinese characters, with or without ASCII/English characters, would be as follows:

system% mp -L $LANGfilename | lp -d  printer

The file may contain ASCII/English characters as well as Traditional Chinese. Refer to the mp(1) man page for more detailed information.

You can also use the utility as a filter, as the utility accepts stdin stream:

system% cat  filename | mp | lp

You can set the utility as a printing filter for a line printer. For example, the following command sequence tells the printer service LP that the printer lp1 accepts only mp format files. This command line also installs the printer lp1 on port /dev/ttya. See the lpadmin (1m) man page for more details.

system% lpadmin -p lp1 -v /dev/ttya -I MP
system% accept lp1
system% enable lp1 

You can add the lpfilter utility for a filter by using the lpfilter(1M) command as follows:

system% lpfilter -f filtername -F pathname

The lpfilter command tells LP that a converter (in this case, xutops) is available through the filter description file named pathname. The pathname can be determined as follows:

Input types: simple
Output types: MP
Command: /usr/bin/mp 

The filter converts the default type file input to PostScript output using /usr/bin/mp.

To print a UTF-8 text file, use the following command:

system% lp -T MP UTF-8-file

For more details on the mp(1) command, refer to the mp(1) man page.