Basics of Japanese Printing

When printing ASCII text, most people either print PostScript directly to a laser printer or run the PostScript file through GhostScript to output to the appropriate file. Japanese characters are printed in basically the same way. Plain text is converted into PostScript with the psconv utility. The Japanese PostScript file is then filtered through GhostScript. Difficulties occur in two main areas: 1) Japanese encoding method input into psconv is not interpretted properly, 2) the Japanese fonts are not installed properly in GhostScript.

The first problem of interpretation of the Japanese encoding method might occur when downloading a web page. You can try running the text file through the nkf kanji filter to convert it into euc.

 # nkf -e testfile.txt > testfile.euc

The problem with GhostScript is more complex. There are three strategies to solve this problem:

• install an alternate font to bitmap converter such as cnprint,
• install GhostScript binaries and fonts from the JE distribution,
• download the source for GhostScript and recompile it.

As of May, 1998, a popular method of printing Japanese in Japan on a Linux system appears to be to use Aladdin Ghostscript 5.03 with VFLib. Binary packages for gs and the fonts are available. The Debian-jp hamm-jp package name is gs-aladdin-vflib_5.10-2.deb. If you install the binary package, the only configuration you may need is the printcap file. Even if you have an English PostScript printer, you still need to run the Japanese text through Ghostscript. Right now I have the following entries in my /etc/printcap. If there is a better way, send me e-mail. I assume there is a way to have magicfilter detect a text file and run it through a filter for me.

lp|lj|hplj4l|HP Laserjet 4L:\
        :lp=/dev/lp1:sd=/var/spool/lpd/hplj4l:\
        :sh:pw#80:pl#72:px#1440:mx#0:\
        :if=/etc/magicfilter/ljet4l-filter:\
        :af=/var/log/lp-acct:lf=/var/log/lp-errs:

lp-text|HP Laserjet 4ML text:\
        :lp=/dev/lp1:\
        sd=/var/spool/lpd/hplj4l:\
        :sh:pw#80:pl#72:px#1440:mx#0:\
        :if=/var/spool/lpd/lp-text/input-filter:

When printing a PostScript file, I give the command /verb+lpr -Plp filename+. This just runs the PostScript file through gs and sends it to the printer.

When printing a text file, I use the command /verb+lpr -Plp-text filename+. The input filter I use is shown below.

nkf -e | \
/usr/bin/psconv - | \
/usr/bin/gs -q -dSAFER -sDEVICE=ljet4 -r300 -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=- - |\
lpr -Plp

The nkf filter converts the text to EUC encoding then pipes it to psconv for conversion to Postscript. The gs program then uses the driver for my printer and pipes it to the printer.