~4Dgifts/toolbox/src/printers/ps_fonts README The main purpose of the files in this dir is to help you check whether the PostScript device you have, or intend to buy, will allow you to print all characters in the alphabets you want to use. CHECK WHICH FONTS IN A POSTSCRIPT DEVICE HAVE ALL ISO 8859-1 CHARACTERS ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ISO 8859-1 is Part 1 of a standard from the International Standards Organization (ISO). This part of the standard specifies a character set that contains characters from the alphabets used in at least the following countries: Argentina Finland Panama Australia France Paraguay Austria Germany Peru Belgium Guatemala Portugal Belize Guyana El Salvador Bolivia Honduras Spain Brazil Iceland Surinam Canada Ireland Sweden Chile Italy Switzerland Colombia Liechtenstein The Netherlands Costa Rica Luxemburg United Kingdom Cuba Mexico United States Denmark New Zealand Uruguay Ecuador Nicaragua Venezuela Faroe Islands Norway These countries use languages which were derived from Latin, such as Spanish, French, and Italian. That is why this part of the standard is sometimes referred to as Latin-1. The X Window System uses the ISO 8859-1 character set for most text fonts. We want to use the ISO 8859-1 character set for most text fonts, because that character set is an international standard, and allows us to cover with one character set the alphabets of many different countries. We would like to be able to enter, display, and print all 191 ISO 8859-1 characters. The problem is that by default most PostScript(r) (PS) devices, such as PS printers, film recorders, and typesetters, use the Standard PS encoding vector for text fonts. Some text fonts in a PS device may not have all the characters from the ISO 8859-1 character set. Non-text fonts, such as the Symbol and Zapf Dingbats fonts, fail the ISO test, because they use special character sets. This directory contains two PS programs called: checkiso.ps checkiso1.ps The main purpose of these programs is to help you check whether the PS device you have or intend to buy will allow you to print all characters in the alphabets you want to use. These programs should be sent to a PS device. If you have a PS printer attached to a Silicon Graphics computer that runs the IRIX operating system, you should enter a command such as: lp checkiso.ps The program checkiso.ps finds out which PS fonts are available on that device, and then checks for each font whether it has all ISO 8859-1 characters. If the program finds fonts that have all ISO 8859-1 characters, it prints the whole ISO 8859-1 encoding vector in first such font. The printout should look like the ISOLatin1Encoding vector shown on p. 599 of the Adobe "PostScript Language Reference Manual," Second Edition, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990, Reading, MA. For more information about ISO 8859-1, read pages 596-599 in that manual and the ISO standard which you can get from the American National Standards Institute. Notice that the Adobe ISOLatin1Encoding vector and the encoding vector used in the programs checkiso.ps and checkiso1.ps contains the following characters which are not specified in the ISO 8859-1 standard: dotlessi grave acute circumflex tilde macron breve dotaccent dieresis ring cedilla hungarumlaut ogonek caron As explained on p. 276 of the Adobe manual, in Type 1 fonts, some accented characters are formed by combining two or more other characters defined in the same font. For example, the character 'Agrave' is composed from the letter 'A' and the accent 'grave.' In original (Level 1) implementations of PostScript, if an encoding vector includes the name of an accented character, it must also include the names of the components of that character. If you don't include the characters listed above, a Level 1 PostScript interpreter may reject as invalid any font you try to create with your ISO encoding vector. For Level 1 PostScript interpreters, you have to specify the ISO 8859-1 encoding vector. For Level 2 PostScript interpreters, you do not have to specify the ISO 8859-1 encoding vector. You can use the vector ISOLatin1Encoding that is defined in Level 2 PostScript interperters. As suggested in an article Glenn Reid posted to the newsgroup comp.lang.postscript, the programs checkiso.ps and checiso1.ps verify whether the ISOLatin1Encoding vector is already defined. If yes, they do not waste memory to define it again. The program checkiso1.ps also finds which fonts are available in the PS device to which it is sent, and then it issues messages about what it finds. If you use a command such as: lp checkiso1.ps the program will send its messages to the file /usr/spool/lp/log of the machine to which the printer is attached. If you use a command such as: lp -om checkiso1.ps the program checkiso1.ps will send you its report by electronic mail. This software is provided without support and without any obligation on the part of Silicon Graphics, Inc. to assist in its use, correction, modification or enhancement. There is no guarantee that this software will be included in future software releases. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITH NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND INCLUDING THE WARRANTIES OF DESIGN, MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR ARISING FROM A COURSE OF DEALING, USAGE OR TRADE PRACTICE. If you have any comments or suggestions about the programs checkiso.ps and checkiso1.ps, please send them to me by e-mail. Ivan Bach, ib@sgi.com
Documentation