how to generate Chinese Characters using Postscript?

Question

Hi All,

Does anyone knows how to generate Chinese characters using Postscript or related tools? I'd like to use unicode to represent Chinese characters but it seems that Postscript doesn't support unicode, yet. In addition, I'd like to specify several fonts to generate the same character.

Thus, I have two questions: 1. how to use unicode in Postscript? Or how to enumerate Chinese Character set in the postscript way? 2. How to specify the fonts configurations using Postscript?

At last, in case postscript cannot do this job, what tools should I turn to for my purpose?

Thank you very much!

-Jin

Answer 1

In Adobe's official PostScript language specification there is no specific support for Unicode fonts. (And this is the final version of the spec for PS Level 3, valid since its publication in 1999 -- PostScript as a language is no longer developed...)

However, PostScript supports (since Level 2) multi-byte fonts (2-, 3- and 4-bytes) in a generic way (see 'CID'). All PostScript fonts need an "encoding": an encoding basically is a table telling at which index position of a font which glyph description for a given character can be found. So while there are no Unicode fonts as such, there are multi-byte CID fonts which provide ranged subsets of Unicode.

Also, there are no freely re-distributable CMaps. (A CMap .) If you need a CMap, you have to derive it from the Windows codepage and the matching Adobe CMap.

If you just look for a "super-simple" method to use Unicode text strings with no need of checking for ranges, language etc.: sorry to disappoint you. There is no way. That would be a pipe dream.

Have a look at CID-keyed fonts instead. These are designed to include a large number of glyphs. (Page 364ff in PLRM)

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Update: Linked to the correct page with CID font description.