support for utf-8 encoding with lpr

Question

While trying to send a text file to the printer via lpr from xterm, the content was corrupted beyond recognition, the cause of which was ultimately traced to the encoding of the file. If I instead process the text with iconv (e.g., iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT), then the file is printed normally. Another suggestion I came across is setting the document format (e.g., lpr -o document-format=text/utf8), but this returns the error lpr: Unsupported document-format "text/utf8". I could always alias the lpr command to include processing by iconv, but is there a more general way for native utf-8 support in the CUPS/lpr system?

Edit: My OS is Debian 8 and my window manager is openbox (no desktop environment). I can print this file without any problem from MacOS X as well as from a Debian7/Gnome3 system.

From my current system, I should point out that even after changing character encoding from UTF-8 to ASCII, the newline characters are not respected by lpr, so the lines are concatenated together and printed until the paper margin is reached. After recoding and transliteration with iconv on MacOS X, the printing still works normally (so the newline issue is also specific to my current system).

Answer 1

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 then cups' texttops.

Answer 2

I don't know if you consider HPLIP an external dependency, but here is the official driver recommendation directly from CUPS.

CUPS Printer Driver: HP4650

and Here is the Package info in the Debian Repo:HPLIPS

As Thushi states your system doesn't know how to rasterize the document without using a tool like paps. Installing the hplip package and configuring it at http://localhost:631 to use the recommended driver will solve your issue. For more info, see the SystemPrinting entry at the DebianWiki

Answer 3

I had the same problem and following how-to helped me to fix it:

http://www.bsmdevelopment.com/Reference/Tech_20130004.html

It's really good. You can even choose a font for text/plain printing like FreeMono or Courier.

Cheers,

Answer 4

You should have something like:

text/plain              application/postscript  33      texttops

in your /etc/cups/mime.convs file. So, I suppose that what needs to be done is to fix the texttops filter. Under Debian, it is /usr/lib/cups/filter/texttops, which is a shell script that uses the texttopdf filter and the pdf2ps command. You can try to replace the texttopdf/pdf2ps invocation by paps, but note that the arguments are not the same. The minimal (since the text is provided to the standard input and the ps result is sent to the standard output) would be a line just containing:

paps

but you may want to add options, e.g.:

paps --font='Monospace 10'

Note: I have not tried. Just speculation...