Incorrect Greek characters when printing directly from LO 3.6

[etsnyman]

Hi all

I have LibreOffice Version 3.6.2.2 on Ubuntu Linux 12.10. I need to print in Greek characters from ancient texts.

When I print directly from LibreOffice, it gives me various weird results. (See attached image.) When I use the font “Linux Libertine” which supports the characters I need, it comes out as complete gibberish. When I switch to the font “FreeSerif” which also supports the characters, it prints with a few errors.

However, when I save as PDF and then print the PDF (Evince PDF viewer) then I get flawless results. I am printing on a Xerox Workstation 5222 using the Generic PCL 5e Printer - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.9 driver, which otherwise has given me perfect results so far.

Am I doing something wrong? Why can I not print directly from LO?

Thanks in advance!!

Click for photo of my printed pages next to each other

[mahfiaz]

Do you print using Postscript or PDF driver? Would it make a difference?

Does the same using LibO 4.0 work?

[froz]

This may not be a solution, but I suggest to install LibreOffice 4.0.x using official PPA to make sure this problem was not already solved. Open terminal and type in the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-4-0

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

[oweng]

@etsnyman, I will look into this tomorrow and see what I can find.

[dajare]

@etsnyman - it seems you and I have similar ancient language requirements. Others are giving expert help on the pressing question (printing). You might also want to look at installing the SBL Greek and/or Gentium Plus and/or Brill fonts. MUCH improved polytonic Greek over LinLib and FreeSerif. Links are availabe in this bookmark bundle. Enjoy!

[oweng]

@dajare, I am glad to see there are GFS fonts in the list. I just used the same fonts presented in the question for my answer, but your point is well made. Thank you.

[etsnyman]

Thanks for the comments, but the font is not an issue. Both on-screen and in PDF, the fonts I use are perfect. Oweng seems to have addressed it as a printer issue. I will look into that…

[etsnyman]

On other printers, the fonts work perfectly. It is a printer issue. I will attempt a solution.

[oweng]

There are several possible issues here and it is always difficult sorting out printing problems as they can involve a chain of services extending well beyond LO. The first thing I would look at is your character encoding / locale on the Xerox workstation. It should be UTF-8 to handle the Greek characters. The left-hand example in your graphic appears to be a character encoding issue to me. Either LO or Ubuntu is not sending the correct information to the printer driver or the printer driver is not correctly interpreting what is being sent.

The second thing I would look at is the printer driver. It is always a good idea to test different drivers / protocols (as suggested by @mahfiaz). I have a HP LaerJet managed by CUPS v1.5.3, using a HP Postscript driver (which is marked as “recommended”), and accessed via Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). I find this a very stable combination. I am not clear what you mean by “Generic PCL 5e Printer” - it sounds like a driver/protocol (PCL) reference, but then you mention Gutenprint. I do not have the printer-driver-gutenprint package installed here.

The third thing to look at is the particular character combinations being employed, especially some of the diacritics. The center and right-hand examples in your graphic show a problem with character interpretation for what appear to be the Greek dasia (U+1FFE) and Greek psili (U+1FEF). I explain in further detail in an example (rename ODT to ZIP and extract contents) as to what these may be. I have no problem printing (under v4.0.3.3) from either the ODT or PDF and the example contains text set in both Linux Libertine G and FreeSerif. I do not think the fonts are an issue.

If you could upload an example file containing some ancient Greek (e.g., from here or here) it may help further. As a guess I would say your problem is most likely to be a printer driver / protocol or locale one.

[etsnyman]

Thank you, oweng, for your answer. It seems to address my issue. I will look into it and let you know…