~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
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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
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