LaserWriter II NT printing spurious Japanese characters

Okay, this is really bizarre! Over the past few weeks, my beloved LaserWriter II NT has begun printing a couple of Japanese characters a few times on each page. They are about 2.5 inches from the left edge of the paper, and they repeat about every 4 inches down the page. They're getting darker (and therefore more obvious) as time goes on, now making the printer useless for any sort of professional communications.
I'm guessing that this is a sign of a terminal software problem in the printer, but before I drag all 45 lbs. of it to the nearest Mac repair shop, I thought I'd ask here for ideas on what might be causing the problem and whether there's anything that can be done about it.
Thanks!
Patty

If your computer already has a serial port (com:), you probably just need a cable. There are several different kinds, but if you have a meter, I or someone else can help with pin assignments.
A serial port may have 25 pins, like a parallel port, or could have 9 pins in the same basic shape, or be a round 8 or 9 pin port, like the other one on the printer. This is the same port you would use to connect to a regular telephone modem for dial-up Internet access. If you do not have one, you would need to add a card.
You will also have to specify the way the port is to work: its speed, number of data bits, parity, and number of stop bits. There may be a control panel for this.
The Centronics-style connectors in general, and the Centronics-50 in particular (used on external SCSI drives) were not invented by Centronics. [Centronics made dot-matrix impact printers with the parallel connector called the Centronics-37. They were very successful, then went bankrupt when quieter printers took over the market.]
The 50-pin connector was developed for use in 6-button office telephone systems, which used 25 pairs of wires. But those connectors were used for so long that they were much cheaper than anything like them, so manufacturers could not resist using them.

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Java PrintService printing Chinese/Japanese characters output is garbled.

Hi Java Gurus,
I have been spending the whole day trying to make our text printing application able to print non-western Characters (e.g. Chinese and Japanese) as part of our requirements. But I am constantly getting garbled output when I print a UTF-8 formatted text file containing Chinese characters. I've been trying to switch the DocFlavor types (e.g. byte array in UTF 8, input stream auto sense, UT8-8, etc) but I couldn't simply make it work.
Here is our test method:
     public void testPrintText(String fileName) throws Exception {
          FileInputStream textStream = new FileInputStream(fileName);
          File file = new File(fileName);
          String fileContent = FileUtils.readFileToString(file);
          DocFlavor flavor = DocFlavor.BYTE_ARRAY.TEXT_PLAIN_UTF_8;
          //DocFlavor flavor = DocFlavor.READER.TEXT_PLAIN;
          InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(textStream, "utf-8");
          DocAttributeSet das = new HashDocAttributeSet();
          //System.out.println("host encoding: " + flavor.hostEncoding);
          Doc mydoc = new SimpleDoc(fileContent.getBytes("utf-8"), flavor, das);
          //Doc mydoc = new SimpleDoc(textStream, flavor, das);
          PrintRequestAttributeSet pas = new HashPrintRequestAttributeSet();
          pas.add(new PrinterName("\\\\fsinec\\Canon iR5055 PCL6", null));
          PrintService[] services = PrintServiceLookup.lookupPrintServices(flavor, pas);
          PrintService defaultService = PrintServiceLookup.lookupDefaultPrintService();
          System.out.println("DEBUG: " + defaultService.getClass().getName());
          if(services.length == 0) {
               if(defaultService == null) {
                    //no printer found
               } else {
                    //print using default
                    DocPrintJob job = defaultService.createPrintJob();
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               PrintRequestAttributeSet attSet = new HashPrintRequestAttributeSet();
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                    PrintService printService = services[ctr];
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Please help me on this.
Thanks.

This could be of different reeasons...
1) Make sure your printer is uni-code enabled.
2) Make sure, your unicode enabled printer is configured in SAP.
3) make sure, your printer device is supported by SAP. (You can find list of SAP recommended printers in www.service.sap.com)
4) Check whether the correct device type is used for printing chinese and japanese characters.
5) Check code pages.
6) Make sure you use Cyrillic font family, for printing chinese and Japanese characters.
Regards,
SaiRam

Printing Japanese characters in English form

Hi all,
i have a requirement to print the japanese characters in the from which is printed in english.
Actually the customer adress is in japanese but when i am printing it,the japanese characters are not getting printed (text is printed as some square boxes).
Any ideas to print the japanese text as it is...
Thanks and Regards,
Sravanthi Chilal

Hi,
Is your text coming from an internal table or it is a standard text that you want to print in adobe form?
If it is standard text or long text,Creating a Text node by right clicking on the top node and then
CREATE -> TEXT.
In the properties of the TEXT node select Text type Include Text and then provide the Text Name, Text Object, Text ID and Text Language values as shown below.
Drag the structure from the interface into the Context.
We can pass the Text node properties values dynamically as well.
If our application makes no use of the Business Address Services but you still want to have country-specific addresses, we must use ABAP coding to achieve this. It is possible to do this in the application program or in the initialization coding of the interface.
In interface,
Define Import parameter under Form Interface.
     IS_CUSTOMER_ID     TYPE     S_CUSTOMER
     IS_COUNTRY          TYPE     LAND1
TYPES:
BEGIN OF ty_adr_printform_table_line,
    line_type      TYPE ad_line_tp,
    address_line LIKE adrs-line0,
END OF ty_adr_printform_table_line.TYPES:
    ty_adr_printform_table TYPE TABLE OF ty_adr_printform_table_line.
Define Global Work Areas and Internal Tables under Global definition as shown below.
IS_ADDRESS           TYPE     ADRS1.
IT_ADDRESS_LINES     TYPE     TY_ADR_PRINTFORM_TABLE.
IS_ADDRESS_LINE     TYPE     TY_ADR_PRINTFORM_TABLE_LINE.
IS_SCUSTOM          TYPE     SCUSTOM.
SELECT SINGLE *
FROM scustom
    INTO is_scustom
WHERE id EQ is_customer_id.is_address-title_text     = is_scustom-form.
is_address-name1     = is_scustom-name.
is_address-street     = is_scustom-street.
is_address-po_box     = is_scustom-postbox.
is_address-post_code1     = is_scustom-postcode.
is_address-city1     = is_scustom-city.
is_address-region     = is_scustom-region.
is_address-country     = is_scustom-country.* Address Format According to Post Office Guidelines
Note : Refer Function module documentation for more information.CALL FUNCTION 'ADDRESS_INTO_PRINTFORM'
EXPORTING
      address_1          = is_address
      address_type     = '1'            "normal/company
       sender_country     = is_country
       number_of_lines     = 8
IMPORTING
address_printform_table = it_address_lines.
*******If the customer address in the database table is in english, you cannot print in Japanese.

Oracle Report Server Issue with Japanese Characters

We are trying to setup a Oracle Report Server to print the Japanese characters in the PDF format.
We have separate Oracle Report servers for printing English, Chinese and Vietnamese characters in PDF formats using Oracle Reports in the production which are running properly with Unix AIX version 5.3. Now we have a requirement to print the Japanese characters. Hence we tried to setup the new server for the same and the configurations are done as same as Chinese/Vietnamese report servers. But we are not able to print the Japanese characters.
I am providing the details which we followed to configure this new server.
1.     We have modified the reports.sh to map the proper NLS_LANG (JAPANESE_AMERICA.UTF8) and other Admin folder settings.
2.     We have configured the new report server via OPMN admin.
3.     We have copied the arialuni.ttf to Printers folder and we have converted this same .ttf file in AFM format. This AFM file has been copied to $ORACLE_HOME/guicommon/gk/JP_Admin/AFM folder.
4.     We have modified the uifont.ali (JP_admin folder) file for font subsetting.
5.     We have put an entry in JP_admin/PPD/datap462.ppd as *Font ArialUnicodeMS: Standard "(Version 1.01)" Standard ROM
6.     We have modified the Tk2Motif.rgb (JP_admin folder) file for character set mapping (Tk2Motif*fontMapCs: iso8859-1=UTF8) as we have enabled this one for other report servers as well.
Environment Details:-
Unix AIX version : 5300-07-05-0831
Oracle Version : 10.1.0.4.2
NLS_LANG : JAPANESE_AMERICA.UTF8
Font Mapping : Font Sub Setting in uifont.ali
Font Used for Printing : arialuni.ttf (Font Name : Arial Unicode MS)
The error thrown in the rwEng trace (rwEng-0.trc) file is as below
[2011/9/7 8:11:4:488] Error 50103 (C Engine): 20:11:04 ERR REP-3000: Internal error starting Oracle Toolkit.
The error thrown when trying to execute the reports is…
REP-0177: Error while running in remote server
Engine rwEng-0 crashed, job Id: 67
Our investigations and findings…
1.     We disabled the entry Tk2Motif*fontMapCs: iso8859-1=UTF8 in Tk2Motif.rgb then started the server. We found that no error is thrown in the rwEng trace file and we are able to print the report also in PDF format… (Please see the attached japarial.pdf for your verification) but we are able to see only junk characters. We verified the document settings in the PDF file for ensuring the font sub set. We are able to see the font sub setting is used.
2.     If we enable the above entry then the rwEng trace throwing the above error (oracle toolkit error) and reports engine is crashed.
It will be a great help from you if you can assist us to resolve this issue…

Maybe 7zip or another tool has workarounds for broken file names, you could try that.
Or you could try to go over the files in the zip archive one-by-one and write it to files out-1, out-2, ..., out-$n without concerning yourself with the file names. You could get file endings back via the mimetype.
This script might work:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <zip.h>
static const char *template = "./out-%04d.bin";
int main(int argc, char**argv)
int err = 0;
zip_t *arc = zip_open((const char*)argv[1], ZIP_RDONLY, &err);
if(arc == NULL)
printf("Failed to open ZIP, error %d\n", err);
return -1;
zip_int64_t n = zip_get_num_entries(arc, 0);
printf("%s: # of packed files: %d\n", argv[1], n);
for(int i = 0; i < n; i++)
zip_stat_t stat;
zip_stat_index(arc, i, ZIP_FL_UNCHANGED, &stat);
char buf[stat.size];
char oname[sizeof(template)];
zip_file_t *f = zip_fopen_index(arc, (zip_int64_t)i, ZIP_FL_UNCHANGED);
zip_fread(f, (void*)&buf[0], stat.size);
snprintf(&oname[0], sizeof(template), template, i);
FILE *of = fopen(oname, "wb");
fwrite(&buf[0], stat.size, 1, of);
printf("%s: %s => %lu bytes\n", argv[1], oname, stat.size);
zip_fclose(f);
fclose(of);
zip_close(arc);
return 0;
Compile with
gcc -std=gnu99 -O3 -o unzip unzip.c -lzip
and run as
./unzip $funnyzipfile
You should get template-named, numbered output files in the current directory.
Last edited by 2ion (2015-05-21 23:09:29)

Printing Japanese Characters on Zebra ZM400 from Smartform

Hi Experts
I am trying to configure a Zebra ZM400 printer to print a Japanese label from a smartform but get no Japanese characters on the output.
The original language of the smartform is English, but I have maintained a translation in SE63 which uses the Andale_J font.
The printer ZM400 has the ANDMJ.TTF font installed and the printer has been set up in SPAD to use the LZEBU2 device type (which is the Zebra Printer Driver for 200dpi) and the Berkeley protocol (U).
When looking at the printer spool in graphical format I am getting the appropriate Japanese characters displayed, when looking in RAW format it appears to be using the correct font, FCANDALE_J, although the characters are represented as #'s. On the printer output, I get numbers or English where no translation has been maintained, but nothing where the Japanese characters should be.
Has anyone come across this problem before, or have any idea how to solve this issue?
Thanks very much
Andrew Beavan

Hi Aidan
Thanks for your swift response, as you may have guessed this is all very new to me and so I am struggling to make much progress.
I have uploaded the andale_j font to the printer which creates a file called anmdj.TTF. I have also uploaded a JIS.DAT file which should convert any TTF to unicode and a printer configuration file which should effectively set this font as the default.
I have tried to upload a TTF font in SAP using se73 and created a device type to go with this, however whenever I set the device type for the printer to this I get no print spool request generated. Based on your reply, I have created a style using the TTF font I uploaded, but again when I reference this in a smartform I get no errors displayed, but I also don't get a print spool request generated so I'm not convinced that the font has been loaded correctly into SAP.
I have just wiped the flash memory on the printer and am re-loading the font using a slightly different setting on the printer, so will try that, but welcome any further suggestions or clarifications if I have mis-understood your previous reply.
Many thanks for your help.
Andrew Beavan

SmartForms Printing Error for Japanese Characters

Hi,
I have an issue with Printing Japanese Characters in the SmartForm.
When I Print Preview the smartform I can see the characters in Japanese but when I Print the actual smartform in the printer, all I get is some junk characters like # and !.
I have the following setting in the smartform.
   Multi-Byte functionality enabled
   Character set used is Shift JIS
   Smartform created in language EN
   Translate to All Languages set to true
   No restriction on Language Control
   Smartstyles used has JPMINCHO fonts only
   Default Para is JPMINCHO
   Characters formatting has explicit JPMINCHO as font
   Login language is JA
   Printer is Local Printer with device type JPSAPWIN
When I debug the Smartform function module, the OTF Data Table (within the function) shows characters in Japanese (with codepage 8000) but then I look at the actual spool as a result of processing the function, it comes up as garbled.
Interestingly, I have exactly the same settings on another test smartform to print just 2 columns and it works well.
Not sure where I am going wrong.
Appreciate help on this issue.
Many Thanks
Krishnan

hi,
has anyone solved this problem? even i m facing the problem. me restating the problem as below:
in VF02 transaction, for billing document we are trying to print smartform. Our logon languagae is EN and the Output Type langugae is EN. In spool, we are getting the CORRECT format ie the texts that are maintained in Japanese are showing as Japanese characters while the whole smartform is in English format.
Our requirement is to PRINT (from printer) the texts that are maintained in Japanese should get printed in Japanese format. I know that this is problem with printer settings. The printer is printing perfectly fine as other documents in Japanese characters so its ensured that printer is enabled for Japanese.
I suppose some kind of setting needs to be done at SAP end so that printer recognises double-byte character set of Japanese.
Waiting for confirmation/ solution.
Thanks
Debs

Printing Japanese characters: ABAP List

Dear all,
How to setup so that my ABAP list can show japanese characters on printers?
We can see it on screen but could not print on printer.
I setup a printer type of HP1160.
When In print out from let's MS word to this printer, japanese characters display well.
BUt it doen't when outpting from SAP.
Please help.
Giang

How about checking printer configuration in SAP using transaction SPAD? Is correct format, characters, codepages are defined?

Printing Japanese characters

hi all,
i've run out of information and ideas to apply to this problem, so i'm hoping someone may be knowledgeable in this area.
i'm using cups and kde, on a current archlinux system. my kde and scim configuration work fine to see and input japanese.
the basic problem is, i need to print japanese characters, but i can't (sort of).
printing alphabet from kde apps, mozilla and openoffice works fine.
printing japanese characters from openoffice works fine.
printing japanese characters from mozilla and kde gives me boxes instead of valid characters.
can anyone point me in a likely direction to solve this problem?
i'll give my heart to the one who is genius enough for the challenge.
bryce

I used to have the problem of seeing only boxes in some programs (don't know about printing since I don't have a printer at the moment) and it went away after installing some other japanese fonts (only had IPA fonts before). In particular I installed
mikachanfont
ttf-kochi-substitute
ttf-mona
ttf-sazanami
You can find all of them in AUR.
If you don't wanna install all of them I'd try the mona one first.
Can't guarantee that it will work, but if you've tried everything else you might wanna give it a shot

Creating a PDF from a SAAS app creates boxes instead of Japanese characters

I'm using an online app (Unleashed Software) to "print" invoices, and the printed invoices show boxes instead of Japanese characters. The really weird thing about this problem, is that it occurs only on certain devices. I've tested on Macs, Windows, Android, and iOS, and on some devices I get the problem, and on some devices I don't. It's not just a Windows problem, or a iOS problem. Additionally, I use different browsers, from Chrome, to IE, to Firefox, to Safari. Changing the browser doesn't seem to help when it's on a device that won't output Japanese characters in a PDF properly.
I'm wondering how PDFs are generated when using online software. Since I can't reproduce the problem on certain devices, it seems to me that the software is using some local settings to render the PDF incorrectly.
Any ideas of how I could go about troubleshooting this problem?

Hi,
Could you please answer the following questions
1.What version of Crystal Reports are you using?
Go to Help-> About to find out.
2.What is the font you are using on the report?
Try to change the font style to MS Gothic or Arial Unicode MS, most preferably MS Gothic.
And export the report to PDF format.
This may help you
Thanks,
Praveen G

Acrobat Pro 9.3.1 does not convert certain Japanese characters

I have a text document that contains a mix of Roman and Japanese characters - when I do Create PDF From File and read that text document in, there is a sequence of 2 Japanese characters that disappear - the text before them and after them appear in the PDF, but there's a void between.
The sequence is (don't know if I can insert Japanese in here...)
before監査証跡after
When the PDF is generated, the first 2 Japanese characters (after the last 'e' in before) do not appear in the PDF.
Here is the source text document (UTF-8 encoded with BOM): http://www.scribd.com/doc/28158046
and here is the resulting PDF: http://www.scribd.com/doc/28158121
Anyone seen this before?

If I paste your "before監査証跡after" into Notepad and save it as UTF-8 text, I can print the file to the Acrobat 9.3.1 Pro "Adobe PDF" printer with no problems at all: the 4 kanji appear in a font Acrobat calls "MS-UIGothic". If I right-click on the saved *.txt file in Windows Exploreer (Vista 64) and select "Convert to Adobe PDF" I still get all the kanji, although the first shows up in Adobe Ming, the 2nd in Adobe Song, and the last 2 in KozGoPr6N.
I can't explain what's going on here, but perhaps this can help point you down a useful path.
David

Chinese/Japanese characters not appearing on smartforms PDF output

Hi,
The print preview of the Smartforms output layout is correctly displaying the characters of native/local languages like Chinese, Japanses etc.....but when i try to print this output, it is printing the junk characters.
Whereas the same printer is able to print the Chinese, Japanese characters when printed from MS Word.
So this issue is occurring only when printing from SAP.
In spool i could see the Chinese/Japanese characters appearing correctly, whereas when i try to convert it to PDF using program RSTXPDFT4, the PDF is again showing junk characters replacing the chinese characters.
Thanks!

This could be of different reeasons...
1) Make sure your printer is uni-code enabled.
2) Make sure, your unicode enabled printer is configured in SAP.
3) make sure, your printer device is supported by SAP. (You can find list of SAP recommended printers in www.service.sap.com)
4) Check whether the correct device type is used for printing chinese and japanese characters.
5) Check code pages.
6) Make sure you use Cyrillic font family, for printing chinese and Japanese characters.
Regards,
SaiRam

Problem in displaying Japanese characters in SAPScripts

Hi All,
I am facing a strange problem in one of my SAPScripts. I have one script in both English and Japanese languages. The scripts are already existing. I had to do some minor changes in a logo window. I did them and i did not do any other changes in any of the windows.
When the output wa s seen for the script in the Japanese version, it was looking ok displaying all hte Japanese characters in various windows. Now, during testing , in the same server, the Japanese characteres are not shown. Instead , some ' #'(hash) symb ols are getting displayed.
How could it happen? Did any body face such problem? If so, can anybody plz help me out with the solution?
What shud i do to get back the Japanese characters in my script again?
Regards,
Priya

Priya.
this is not an ABAP problem ask your BASIS team to set printer cofing from SPAD.dont worry its not an ABAP issue at all.
sometime printer doesnt support special char so it need to be setting with printer.
Amit.

Japanese characters are broken

The code below prints the Japanese text properly in both System console and in browser
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS" %>
<html>
<body>
<form>
<%
request.setCharacterEncoding("Shift_JIS");
String value = request.getParameter("txtJapan");
System.out.println("Value : " + value);
out.println("Value : " + value);
%>
<input name="txtJapan" >
<input type="SUBMIT" />
</form>
</body>
</html>However the same code is not working (i.e. Japanese characters are not correctly displayed) when this Page is called thru faces servlet. I have also tried using JSF components on this page, but they too don't display as expected.
Even after setting the content type and charcter encoding to Shift_JIS in JSP page (using the page directive as shown in the code above), after passing thru faces servlet both request.getCharacterEncoding() and response.getCharacterEncoding() return "null" and "ISO-8859-1" respectively
I think due to this I am not getting the Japanese character properly in browser as well as in System console.
In order to work I have created a filter and set both the content type and character encoding.
public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
     response.setContentType("text/html; charset=Shift_JIS");
     request.setCharacterEncoding("Shift_JIS");
     chain.doFilter(request, response);
}I don't know whether this approach is the right way or something has to be done in faces servlet itself.
I am also seeing another weird problem -- for the JSF command button if the label attribute value is "Go" then in the console I am getting the HTML encoded character (奈&#33391). But the browser automatically convert the encoded character and display Japanese character properly. However, when the label is anything other than "Go" both console as well as browser displays proper Japanese characters.

Heh, yeah, it's old topic and I wasn't really sure if somebody will reply to it, but I tried anyway.
I haven't come to issue of DB yet but I guess I'll as soon as I solve this one. I remember when I was using EA everything works so fine so I didn't pay any attention this time until some coworker told me.
I saw that filter and it's similar to mine which is unfortunately not working and I still have no ideas why.
Here's my filter code:
     public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws ServletException, IOException {
          System.err.println("Before: "+request.getParameter("form1:text1"));
          String encoding = "UTF-8";
          System.err.println("doFiler(): setting encoding to "+encoding);
          request.setCharacterEncoding(encoding);
          System.err.println("After: "+request.getParameter("form1:text1"));
          chain.doFilter(request, response);
When I enter string č�ćđ� and run it I get following to log
That's what I get in log file:
2004-09-01 15:08:16,264 INFO (EncodingFiler.java:33) => Before: ?????
2004-09-01 15:08:16,264 INFO (EncodingFiler.java:38) => doFiler(): setting encoding to UTF-8
2004-09-01 15:08:16,264 INFO (EncodingFiler.java:41) => After: ?????
but in JSP page I see ISO-8859-1. Any ideas?

Preview and Printing of Chinese Characters in Smartform

Hi everyone!
I have a development that needs to output in Smartform a combination of Chinese and English characters, on an English Logon,
When I debug the form, the Chinese characters are shown in the debug screen, but when it is previewed or printed, it shows garbage. Can anyone help me with this?
Thanks a lot! Points for any helpful answer!

Hi
check this OSS Note
OSS Note: 776507
Symptom
Documents printed via SAPscript or SmartForms do not print with correct special characters, e.g. ### prints instead of Japanese or Russian characters. What to do?
Other terms
SAPscript, SmartForms, printing, device types, OTF
Reason and Prerequisites
Help required to choose proper fonts in a SAPscript or SmartForm
Solution
When using SAPscript or SmartForms to print (or email or fax) a form from a business application, many factors influence the outcome of the actual text within the form. All these factors must be checked in order to ensure a correct printout:
1) The language version of the form used to produce the printout.
Example: If you want to print a French invoice, you need to have a FR version of your SAPscript or SmartForms invoice form RVINVOICE01. And the application program must specify the corresponding language key (FR) when calling the SAPscript or SmartForms API.
2) The font selections specified in the form (possibly also in a SAPscript style or SmartStyle used in a form).
Example: In a SAPscript form or a SmartStyle you need to specify HELVE if you want to print German text in Helvetica (or similar) font. If you want to print Japanese text, HELVE is not a valid choice but you need to specify a Japanese font like JPMINCHO in your Japanese form.
3) The output character set of the device type
Every printer in transaction SPAD has a "device type" assigned. Device types used by the spooler for printing support only one single specific output character set. All text from the form has to be converted (using SAP's built-in character conversion mechanism) to this output character set.
A character set can typically support either a single language (e.g. Shift-JIS which supports only Japanese) or a set of languages (e.g. ISO 8859-1, which supports Western-European languages). It is possible that a given language (such as German) can be supported by several output character sets, e.g. you may use either ISO 8895-1 (Latin-1) or ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) to represent German text. This is so because both character sets contain the special characters used in German.
Example: HPLJ4000 is a HP LaserJet device type supporting the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set. ISO 8859-1 can be used to represent e.g. Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish but NOT Russian or Japanese.
As a consequence, it is ok to use HPLJ4000 to print English, German French etc. but not for Japanese or Russian.
4) The set of available printer fonts for a given device type
When formatting a document, SAPscript and SmartForms perform an automatic mapping of the font definitions in the form (e.g. "HELVE 14 point bold") and the available printer fonts of the device type. A replacement printer font is chosen, should the specified font selection not be available in the device type. Now this replacement can be problematic if a language-specific font, such as Chinese CNSONG, is specified in a form and it gets replaced by a font which does not support this language, e.g. COURIER.
To solve this problem, font families in SE73 have language attribute assigned, e.g. some fonts are characterized as being suitable only for certain languages. And when a replacement has to be chosen because the original font from the form is not available in the device type, a replacement font is chosen which has the same language attributes.
If no fonts for the language in question exist in the device type, the resulting font will not be able to print the special characters and you will see "wrong" output characters in the printout.
Note on SAPscript/SmartForms Print Preview:
The OTF Print Preview available in Windows GUI (e.g. from transaction SP01) will sometimes not show the "wrong" characters which appear on the final printout. Here is the reason: since the Print Preview runs in Windows environment, it will use Windows fonts to represent the actual printer fonts. A Windows font typically has more available characters (i.e. covers more character sets) than are actually available in a printer's resident font.
A typical example where the Print Preview will differ from the printout is here: if you have a Chinese PCL5 printer such as CNHPLJ4 and use the Western Latin font COURIER in your document, the print preview will show you Chinese characters if you (by accident) tried to format Chinese characters in COURIER font. This is because Windows will automatically choose a font that can output Chinese characters (which is actually not Courier). But when you print the job on an actual PCL5 printer with resident Western and Chinese fonts, the Courier font will not print any Chinese characters but Western special characters instead, because the printer's resident Courier font does not include Chinese characters.
Rule of thumb: all Asian device types (e.g. CNHPLJ4, JPHPLJ4, JPPOST, KPHPLJ4) support not only Asian fonts but also COURIER, HELVE and TIMES fonts. But these Latin fonts can only be used to print English text, not Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters.
Which fonts are suitable for a given language?
Language(s):            Font family to use in a form:
Latin-1 (Western Europe/Americas) *******
DE,EN,FR,ES,NL,SV       COURIER, HELVE, TIMES
                        (LETGOTH, LNPRINT)
Latin-2 (Central Europe) ****************
PL, CZ                  COURIER, HELVE, TIMES
ISO 8859-4 (Baltic) *********************
ET, LT, LV              COURIER, HELVE, TIMES
ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic) *******************
BG, RU, SR, UK          COURCYR, HELVCYR, TIMECYR
ISO 8859-7 (Greek) **********************
EL                      COUR_I7, HELV_I7, TIME_I7
ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew) *********************
HE                      COURIER, HELVE, TIMES
ISO 8859-9 (Turkish) ********************
TR                      COURIER, HELVE, TIMES
Simplified Chinese **********************
ZH                      CNHEI, CNKAI, CNSONG
Japanese ********************************
JA                      JPMINCHO, DBMINCHO, DBGOTHIC
Korean **********************************
KP                      KPBATANG, KPDODUM, KPGULIM
                        KPGUNGSE, KPSAMMUL
Traditional Chinese *********************
ZF                      TWDPHEI, TWMING, TWSONG
Thai ************************************
TH                      THANGSAN, THDRAFT, THVIJIT
Arabic (Unicode systems only) ***********
AR                      ANDALE_J
Verify your output by examining the OTF data
When analysing printing problems of this type, be sure to check the OTF data which gets produced by SAPscript or SmartForms. OTF or "Output Text Format" is the intermediate page-description format generated from SAPscript or SmartForms. OTF will contain the final printer font names and character set/language identifiers which help to solve the problem. OTF will even name the form and the language of the form used to create the output.
The easiest way to do this is to create a spool request from your application, run transaction SP01, use menu
Goto->Display Requests->Settings
and choose
Display Mode: Raw
Now display your spool request. If this is a SAPscript or SmartForms spool request, you will see OTF data. Each line represents one OTF command, every command starts with a 2-character cmd identifier and possibly some cmd parameters follow.
Here is an excerpt from a sample OTF file where we highlight the most interesting commands:
//XHPLJ8000    0700 00000000001
IN04EALEXTEST_ZEBRA
IN05%PAGE1
OPDINA4 P 144 240 1683811906000010000100001
IN06%WINDOW2
MT0024401289
CP11000000E
FCHELVE 120 00109XSF100SF101110000067E X
UL +0000000000000
SW00067
CT00000000
ST0453037Dieses SF hat Stil ALEXTEST_ZEBRA mit
The 1st line with the // (Control) command reveals the device type usedto print: HPLJ8000
//XHPLJ8000    0700 00000000001
The 2nd line (IN = Info command) shows the name and (internal 1-char)language key of the form:
IN04EALEXTEST_ZEBRA
In this case it is the English (E = EN) SmartForm ALEXTEST_ZEBRA
The OP-line (OP = Open Page) gives the page format used in the form, it is DINA4 Portrait orientation:
OPDINA4 P 144 240 1683811906000010000100001
The CP (CodePage) cmd shows the SAP system codepage used to code the text and the active language. In our case it is codepage 1100 and language E = EN = English.
CP11000000E
Finally, the FC-cmd (Font Call) lists a printer font selected within SmartForms. Please note that every SmartForm has a designated default SmartStyle under "Form Attributes->Output Options". In addition, every text node can have a SmartStyle attached (which will override the definitions from the default style for the text). In our case the resulting printer font that was selected is HELVE 12.0 pt bold-off, italic-off.
FCHELVE   120 00109XSF100SF101110000067E X
Regards
Anji

Passing Japanese characters to Java program

Hi,
I am using Java POI APIs for creating/modifying excel spreadsheets. The platform is Solaris. The data to be populated contains both English as well as Japanese characters. The input data to Java program comes from a perl program. When I populate the data in excel or even print using System.out.println, it prints ???... for Japanese characters. The data is in SJIS format.
I tried converting it to UNICODE in java but that doesn't seem to be working.
I also tried using native2ascii for converting the data to UNICODE before it is fed to Java program using the following command
native2ascii -encoding SJIS <Input File> <Output File>
Although it converts the charaters into UNICODE correctly in the form \u8a3c\u523... but when it is input to Java, the program prints the string as such.
But if this string is hardcoded in the program, the Japanese characters are printed correctly.
Could anybody please throw some light as to the data should actually be passed to the Java program.
Thanks

Sekhar
Ive realised the solution will probably involve HttpServletRequest.setCharacterEncoding.
Im now upgrading to Tomcat 4 because 3 didnt support this method. Once I'm through the upgrade, I'll try Japanese the chars again.
I would guess I need to force my web pages to utf-8 and use HttpServletRequest.setCharacterEncoding(utf-8) in the servlet to get it working ?

LaserWriter II NT printing spurious Japanese characters

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