HP-UX 11i v3 International Printing Features

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I18N Printing Support on HP-UX
The HP-UX operating system supports the printing of local language characters in text files and web
pages
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for various types of printers. HP-UX uses the Line Printer Spooling System (LP spooler) for
printer management. Figure 1 below illustrates the way LP spooler handles print requests in HP-UX.
The LP spooler relies on printer model files to properly format and structure the incoming data into a
format or language that printers can understand directly. The lp command that sends the print
request to the LP spooler (lpsched) can use the –o option to pass parameters to the model files in
order to alter the LP spooler behavior.
Figure 1. LP spooler handling a printing request in HP-UX
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Control
information
One of the most important pieces of information that users have to inform the printing subsystem when
doing I18N printing is the character-set encoding (codeset), which is used to encode characters in the
input files. Depending on the codeset being used, the same set of byte sequences can mean
completely different characters in different codesets. Unless the computer world can standardize on a
universal encoding standard, such as Unicode, and abandon legacy codesets, users will continue to
encounter problems when specifying codesets. Therefore, using the correct codeset information is
critical in I18N printing. You can usually achieve this by passing the appropriate locale name that
supports the desired codeset to the model files by via the -o option to the lp command.
Different manufacturers use different printer control languages to control their printers. In many cases,
multiple printer control languages are supported by the same printer. The most widely used printer
control languages include PCL, PostScript, ESC/P, and LIPS. For a more complete description of some
of the common printer control languages, see Appendix A.
Table 1 shows the model files that support local-language character printing, along with the printer
types or languages and the file formats supported.
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