OpenPrinting / OpenPrinting/foomatic-db

Fonts: how to map ROM fonts to OS fonts?

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Description

Apologies in advance if this is the incorrect project to ask this in.

I've recently had to switch to the foomatic pxlcolor driver for the Samsung CLX6220FX colour laser after the existing Samsung Unified Linux Driver (SULD) using CUPS/PDF could cause the printer to power reset. I eventually deduced it was due to CUPS sending PDF v1.4 but the printer supporting only v1.00.82 (2009).

  1. Because the printer has a large number of internal fonts (both Postscript and PCL) I have been trying to determine how one is supposed to map OS-installed fonts to printer ROM fonts so instead of the driver sending the rasterised OS font image it can simply select the printer ROM font?
  2. A secondary question is: Using the pxlcolor driver the generated PPD still lists standard Postscript fonts but doesn't list the printer's PCL fonts. Is it possible to use the PCL fonts and if so how should they be declared in PPD or elsewhere, and how mapped from OS ?

E.g. when asking the printer to print the font reports (for Postscript, and for PCL) the Postscript list contains those listed in the PPD boilerplate list (plus many more - 4 pages worth - which exaclty matches the specific PPD for CLX6220 ) but not those in the PCL list. That list is:

Courier SWC
Courier SWC Bold
Courier SWC Italic
Courier SWC Italic Bold
Letter Gothic
Letter Gothic Bold
Letter Gothic Italic
Naskh BT
Naskh BT Bold
Koufi BT
Koufi BT Bold
Courier SWA
Courier SWA Bold
Courier SWA Italic
Courier SWA Italic Bold
Dutch801 SWC
Dutch801 Bold
Dutch801 SWC Italic
Dutch SWC Italic Bold
zapfHumst Dm SWC
zapfHumst Dm SWC Bold
zapfHumst Dm SWC
zapfHumst Dm SWC Italic
zapfHumst Dm SWC Italic Bold
...

That's ½ a page of 3½ pages of fonts and the names rarely match. Even where they do - e.g. Letter Gothic - the examples printed are different shaped glyphs.

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  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the pxlcolor-generated PPD and the referenced Samsung_CLX-6220_Series.ppd in db/source/PPD/Samsung/PS/, then compare their declared fonts with the printer's PostScript and PCL font reports. Determine whether the issue requires a documented mapping or database and PPD changes for selecting the printer's ROM fonts.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
linux
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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