Printing UTF-8 plain text

When printing plain text files, you might be confronted with all sorts of incompatibilities;

• The characterset of your document is different from your printer's characterset.
• Some of the glyphs you want to print are not in any of the printer's build-in fonts.

This type of trouble is often referred to as 'alphabet soup' or 'Mojibake'.

There is a way to avoid all this trouble;

1. Make Unicode / UTF-8 the default characterset of all your apps, documents and systems.
2. Don't use the build-in founts of your printer. Use the (true type) fonts installed on your computer instead.

For this I created a UTF-8 TXT printqueue;
From /etc/printcap;

txt|UTF-8 txt:\
        :lp=/dev/null:\
        :sd=/var/spool/lpd/txt:\
        :if=/usr/local/bin/utxt-local:\
        :mx#0:\
        :sh:

A slightly different syntax (lprng);

txt|UTF-8 txt:\
        :lp=/dev/null:\
        :sd=/var/spool/lpd/txt:\
        :if=/usr/local/bin/utxt-local:\
        :mx=0:\
        :sh:

This printcap entry sends the data to the script 'utxt-local';

With uniprint

#!/bin/bash

# This script converts UTF-8 txt to postscript

uniprint -printer lp -size 8 -hsize 0 -font /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeMono.ttf

'uniprint', which is in Debian package 'yudit', converts the text to postscript using a True Type Font. This data is then send to the postscript queue (on this system 'lp' is the postscript queue).

You can use any (monospaced) True Type Font for this;

uniprint -printer lj -size 8 -hsize 0 -font /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf

You can even specify more than one font, creating a virtual font;

uniprint -printer lp -size 8 -hsize 0 \
        -font /path/to/1st-font.ttf \
        -font /path/to/2nd-font.ttf

See 'man uniprint' for more info.

With paps

The same can be done with paps;

#!/bin/bash

# This script converts UTF-8 txt to postscript

paps | lpr

Sometimes you need to specify the prinqueue;

#!/bin/bash

# This script converts UTF-8 txt to postscript

paps | lpr -P lj

Paps does a much better job than cups' texttops.

These setups do not depend on gs fonts, the printer's build-in fonts or the printer's default character set.