printing Posrscript with Chinese characters

[Sandeep Chaturvedi]

hi,

We have an Oracle database on HPUX server. The database contains Chinese characters as pair of 8-bit characters. We generate reports which may have chinese characters in it. The reports are in Postscript. The problem is that when the report is printed (using "lp -d report.ps") those Chinese characters appear as the pair of 8-bit characters and not Chinese. We are using InfoReport server for HPUX as our reporting application. The NLS_LANG (for Oracle) environment variable is also set properly on the server (same as the DB's character set, which is ISO8859-1).

My problem could be that we do not have proper postscript fonts on the HPUX server and/or the printer (printer is HPLaserJet 4100n).

I dont know much about Postscript, so could you help me with getting Postscript fonts which support CJK characters and also give info about how to install these fonts for use in HPUX server and the printer.

I did some investigation on Postscript fonts myself. Here is what I found out:
The Adobe Postscript documentation says that type 1 postscript fonts may not be able to display CJK characters. I will need composite or CID encoded postscript fonts. I got hold of some free CID encoded fonts from Adobe's website, but I dont know how to install and use them on either the HPUX server or my printer. Any help in this regard will be greatly appreciated.

thanks,
Sandeep

[Bill Hassell]

Unlike PC Windows where there is a complete printer subsystem that handles fonts, HP-UX printing is WYSIWYG, that is, it will do no special processing of your print files except to prepend and postpend a few codes to control paper selection, etc.

Since your application program is already creating the Postscript code (HP-UX does not generate Postscript at all), that is where the changes must be made. Contact the mfr of the InfoReport program for assistance.

[Sandeep Chaturvedi]

Bill,

Thanks for the clarification.

Here is something else I tried after your answer:
I generated an HTML report from the Inforeport application and FTPd it to my WinXP (with Asian language pack installed) workstation. There I could see the chinese characters when I opened the HTML in IE browser. Then I printed that HTML to a file ("try.ps") using a postscript printer driver. I FTPd the generated Postscript file back to the HPUX machine and did "lp -d try.ps" and the printed sheet had the correct Chinese characters (just what I needed).

So my next question: is it possible to do something like the above without the Windows machine in the picture. Does HPUX have any "printer driver" which can do something similar?
My HPUX box is a B2600 visualize workstation with HPUX 11.0 on it.

thanks,
Sandeep