# Printing

FontForge will only produce postscript when it prints, this may be directed to a file, a printer, ghostview or an arbitrary command.

When you choose to print you have the option of printing:

- All the characters of your font, in a rectangular grid:
- Certain selected characters, one per page, at a scale to fill up the page
- Certain selected characters at various pointsizes (72, 48, 36, 24, 20, 18, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7.5, 7, 6.5, 6, 5.5, 5, 4.5, 4)
- A sample of the font in use. This will handle kerning, bi-directional text, anchored marks and composing characters. Note: The characters printed are limited by the characters in the current encoding here. If you want to see all the characters try a unicode encoding.

The print dialog appears at right. The four choices are reflected by the radio buttons (the Full Page Character and Multi Size Character buttons will print any selected characters in the font view, the current character in the outline view, and any characters displayed in the metrics view -- they will be greyed out if no characters are selected in the font view).

The PointSize field applies to the Full Font Display and the Sample Text methods. For Sample Text you may enter several different pointsizes (separated by commas) to print the sample at different pointsizes.

The Sample Text is fairly self-explanatory. The default sample text is geared to your font, if your font does not contain (for instance) greek characters, then the greek will not appear. Of course you may change it however you wish...

You may also save the sample text to a file by typing ^S within the textarea. The text will be saved in ucs2 format (starting with 0xfeff). And you my import text into the textarea by typing ^I. Files imported should be either in ucs2 (possibly byte reversed, determined by the initial U+FEFF), in utf8 (again with an initial U+FEFF) or in the current default encoding.

The Setup button allows you to pick a printer, pagesize, etc.

You may choose to queue the result with lp or lpr, you may also direct it to ghostview, or simply print to a file. Files may be written in either postscript or pdf formats (if you send output to a file you will be prompted for a filename after you click OK in the Print (not the PageSetup) dialog). You can also direct the print run to any command you choose (the "Other" option). This command must expect to find a postscript file on its standard input, if the command needs any arguments (a common example might be the "-" used by many commands to make them read standard input) they should be placed in the text field with the command name.

FontForge knows about certain standard sizes of paper. If you want to use a size which isn't on the list then enter it as 8.5x11in or 21x29.7cm.

FontForge will read your printcap file to get a list of printers. It also adds one magic entry "<default>" if you select this (or if you leave the printer blank) then lp or lpr will chose their default printer.

The Printer and Copies arguments are not meaningful when using ghostview or printing to a file.

Obviously my samples are based on european and CJK character sets. If anyone has a small section of text in any language not represented please send me a copy. Copyright free, of course, and preferably in a unicode encoding...

Sources of the samples...

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