HP-UX 11i v3 International Printing Features

Abstract

This paper discusses general concepts of printing different kinds of international characters and the

focuses are on international printing using HP’s PCL or PostScript

printers on the HP-UX 11i v3

operating system environment. This paper refers to such as I18N

printing.

Intended Audience

This paper is primarily intended for general users and system administrators who have the need to

print international characters on the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system environment. Some of the content

of this paper also contains technical details that are intended for developers and system integrators

and is not covered in other documents.

Overview of I18N Printing on HP-UX

This paper talks about how to use I18N Printing on HP-UX 11i v3. The term local-language character

printing is also used in this paper when the focus is on printing characters for a certain language

rather than printing characters from a number of different languages at the same time. The content of

this paper is valid for the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system environment but might be changed in a

future release.

Characters and Fonts for Printing

In the context of printing, a character is an abstract symbol whereas a glyph is a specific rendering of

a character. Glyphs are organized into fonts. A font defines glyphs for a particular character set in a

particular typeface. Printing text that contains local language characters requires the use of fonts that

support a particular set of local language characters.

Fonts required for local-language character printing are acquired in the following three ways:

• The printer has built-in fonts that support the local language.

• The printer does not have the required built-in fonts, but it can accept an optional font cartridge or

font disk that contains the required local language fonts. The fonts can be either permanently

installed or temporarily downloaded for certain print jobs.

• The print job itself embeds all the required font data from font files that are available within the

operating system to make all the local language characters printable.

Sometimes a combination of these approaches can be used. A print job can use built-in fonts for some

characters but can include the required fonts for other characters that the printer does not support.

Most European languages can be covered in simple single-byte character sets like ISO Latin 1, 2, or

9. The number of characters in these character sets is small enough and the market is big enough that

many printers support those character sets natively. For other character sets with large number of

characters, such as Asian languages, printers with built-in fonts might not be the best solution. In such

cases, alternative approaches by printers are available to support the large number of characters.

Various options for handling the large number of characters, such as optional font cartridge,

downloading fonts and embedding fonts in print jobs, can also be implemented. Because of the large

character repertoire supported by Asian languages, upgrading the amount of printer memory might

be required for optimal performance.

HP-UX supports various ways of using fonts for printing local language characters. HP-UX printing

features are designed to utilize the best font-handling methods for each printer type and configuration.

I18N is an abbreviation for the word internationalization, which has 18 characters between the letters “i” and “n.”