Problem with DCPS ANSI to PS converter

[Valentin Likoum]

Hello all,

I have a problem with DCPS ANSI to PS converter. It converts source letters in 0xC0-0xFE range to '\xxx' octal codes accordinly to the current charset. Default charset (ISO Latin-1) doesn't contain letters 0xD0, 0xDE, 0xF0, 0xFE which definitly required in cyrillic charsets. Converter replaces these characters from source ASCII text with '\035' in the resulting PS code. I tried to switch to cyrillic charset {)L~} - no luck, converter most likely doesn't support cyrillic charset and none of the supported charsets (seen in Digital ANSI-Compliant PPL 3 Programming Reference Manual, 1990 year edition) contains all the letters in 0xC0-0xFE range.
How can I switch to charset with all characters in the range? Or may be it's possible to make converter not to convert 8-bit symbols to \xxx code at all and leave them as-is?
Thank you.

[Valentin Likoum]

Sorry, forgot to say DCPS v2.2, VMS 7.3

[Chris Davis_9]

Hi Valentin!

We're running DCPS v2.3 at present on VMS v7.2-1 and v7.3-2.

How is your current application (pre DCPS) using cyrillic character sets - are they provided by additional font cartridges in the printer or fonts provided on the printer itself?

We used the CG Triumvirate font on our old Digital LN08 printers and had to buy a SoftFont and load this into a library to render it available to DCPS.

However, it looks as though the SoftFont kits are no longer available from HP (see comments on Character Sets in the DCPS documentation).

I've had no problem with character selection, but then we are only using the UK character set anyway

[Valentin Likoum]

Hello Chris,

> How is your current application (pre DCPS)
> using cyrillic character sets - are they
> provided by additional font cartridges in
> the printer or fonts provided on the
> printer itself?

We are using LG12/LG15 matrix printers - they have cyrillic charset installed.

> However, it looks as though the SoftFont
> kits are no longer available from HP (see
> comments on Character Sets in the DCPS
> documentation).

I have no problem with cyrillic PS fonts - I have them loaded as persistent resourse (as described in the docs). And I redefine all the TRN$ANSI_BOX_x (x=0..7) to
{ /CourierCyrPS findfont [1000 0 0 -1000 0 0] makefont setfont } in the default form' setup module.

> I've had no problem with character selection

I'm too - on the printer. Printers (LGs and PS printers) know cyrillic charset. The problem not in the printer but in the DCPS ANSI to PS converter - it doesn't know cyrillic charset AFAIK. I need to convince it somehow to pass all the chars in the 0xC0-0xFE range.
Well, really it's possible with DEC Technical charset(ESC-sequence before text). But then converter produces code like this:

TRN$ANSI_BOX_1
1 -1 F 0 -84168 T
1800 1800 T
0 1991 M S % initial position
(testa ) D % latin part of test text
R TRN$ANSI_BOX_5
4176 1991 M S % reposition
(\364\305\323\324) D % cyrillic part of test text
R TRN$ANSI_BOX_1
6960 1991 M S % reposition
( testb) D % latin part of test text

and due to this repositioning between TRN$ANSI_BOX_1 and TRN$ANSI_BOX_5 result looks ugly. So IMHO DEC Technical charset is not a correct solution, but no other charset (known to converter) contains all the required characters. So I'm stuck.
Thank you.