Bug 988909 - Japanese characters stopped printing
Summary: Japanese characters stopped printing
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: cups-filters
Version: 19
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Tim Waugh
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 990228
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2013-07-26 16:55 UTC by Pete Zaitcev
Modified: 2013-08-28 09:11 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version: ghostscript-9.07-12.fc19
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2013-08-23 00:37:38 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)


Links
System ID Private Priority Status Summary Last Updated
Launchpad 1205511 0 None None None Never

Description Pete Zaitcev 2013-07-26 16:55:39 UTC
Description of problem:

After update to Fedora 19, Japanese characters are replaced
with a placeholder symbol. This worked in Fedora 19.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

cups-1.6.3-1.fc19.x86_64
ghostscript-9.07-10.fc19.x86_64

How reproducible:

100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. echo 'проверка test テスト' | lpr

Actual results:

Blank Japanese characters, Russian characters okay

Expected results:

All characters printed

Additional info:

Since Russian works, we know that UTF-8 text is parsed properly,
so perhaps it's just some fonts missing. However, the point is that
this system was upgraded and the upgrade broke something. Hopefuly
it's just Requires: in a spec somewhere, or an upgrade scriptlet.

Comment 1 Pete Zaitcev 2013-07-28 23:45:55 UTC
Since I updated with yum, I kept the old /var/log/yum.log, here's the
versions that worked previously:

Feb 23 14:02:38 Updated: 1:cups-1.5.4-20.fc18.x86_64
Feb 23 17:27:54 Updated: gutenprint-cups-5.2.9-2.fc18.x86_64
Apr 24 09:00:53 Updated: gutenprint-cups-5.2.9-7.fc18.x86_64

Also, Ubuntu bug says that a question mark is printed. In my case,
a square is printed.

Comment 2 Tim Waugh 2013-07-30 15:31:22 UTC
With cups-filters we switched over to texttopdf for formatting text/plain, and unfortunately it has a design issue: it uses its own static mapping for which fonts to use for each unicode range, rather that using fontconfig to do work out glyph coverage at run-time.

I'm not sure how hard it would be to fix this, but last time we had a new implementation of the texttops filter (the paps-based texttopaps) it took quite a time before the bugs were ironed out.

I would rather switch back to texttopaps for the time being until texttopdf is more mature and better able to handle unicode.

However, in my local testing I discovered another paps issue... I'll file that now.

Comment 3 Tim Waugh 2013-07-30 16:15:44 UTC
I've changed the cost for the text filters from '0' to '200' so that paps will be used by preference if installed. If the paps filters do not give good output, they can be uninstalled and texttopdf will be used instead.

Comment 4 Fedora Update System 2013-08-21 13:40:44 UTC
ghostscript-9.07-12.fc19,cups-filters-1.0.36-2.fc19 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 19.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/ghostscript-9.07-12.fc19,cups-filters-1.0.36-2.fc19

Comment 5 Fedora Update System 2013-08-22 00:46:42 UTC
Package ghostscript-9.07-12.fc19, cups-filters-1.0.36-2.fc19:
* should fix your issue,
* was pushed to the Fedora 19 testing repository,
* should be available at your local mirror within two days.
Update it with:
# su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing ghostscript-9.07-12.fc19 cups-filters-1.0.36-2.fc19'
as soon as you are able to.
Please go to the following url:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-15111/ghostscript-9.07-12.fc19,cups-filters-1.0.36-2.fc19
then log in and leave karma (feedback).

Comment 6 Fedora Update System 2013-08-23 00:37:38 UTC
ghostscript-9.07-12.fc19, cups-filters-1.0.36-2.fc19 has been pushed to the Fedora 19 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 7 Pete Zaitcev 2013-08-26 15:46:58 UTC
Tim, I'm sorry to report that the update didn't fix the problem.
However, if it matters, the output has changed: the placeholder rectangles
were empty before, but they have question marks in them now. So, a different
font is selected, perhaps.

I am hesitant to reopen, because it does not seem too important. For now
I work around it by copy-pasting into LO and printing from there.

Comment 8 Pete Zaitcev 2013-08-26 15:48:22 UTC
I forgot to mention that I re-installed F19 from scratch, so this is not
the original updated system anymore.

ghostscript-9.07-12.fc19.x86_64
cups-filters-1.0.36-2.fc19.x86_64

Comment 9 Tim Waugh 2013-08-27 12:35:36 UTC
Oh, I should have mentioned: the cups-filters/ghostscript change was partly to adjust the filter costs so that the "paps" package gets used in preference when converting text/plain.

Do you have paps installed?

Comment 10 Pete Zaitcev 2013-08-27 13:43:44 UTC
Yes, paps-0.6.8-26.fc19.x86_64.

Comment 11 Tim Waugh 2013-08-27 14:19:18 UTC
If you install the vlgothic-fonts package, does it work correctly then?

Comment 12 Pete Zaitcev 2013-08-27 14:37:52 UTC
I already have vlgothic-fonts-20130607-1.fc19.noarch, but yes, I suspected
a font was missing. The text shows fine in gnome-terminal, but I have no
clue how to know what's being used for a font.

Comment 13 Tim Waugh 2013-08-28 09:11:50 UTC
If you run that input through paps by hand, do the characters render correctly?


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