Printing from the Web on Athena

Why is this necessary?

Unfortunately, Netscape does not reliably allow you to print Web pages with Japanese text on them directly to the Athena Postscript printers, nor can you save the Postscript to a file and later print that. For some reason, the routines the UNIX versions of Netscape use to dump the Postscript data unrecoverably chew up the Japanese text, and produce garbage.

What can you do?

You can, however, get at least the Japanese text to print out if you save the Web page as plain text, and then print that using the "jlpr" command. NOTE: you will not get a printout of any of the graphics on the page when you do this. We're sorry, but there appears to be nothing we can do about this until Netscape fixes foreign language support in their browser, and they show no signs of doing so. If you want the pictures, you can just print the pages normally, but then the Japanese text will be unreadable.

Printing from Netscape

1. First, make sure your Web browser is displaying the page you want.
2. Then choose the "Save As" menu item from the "File" menu.
3. You will get a dialog box which looks something like this:

   

4. Set the button in the middle of the dialog box, next to the "Format for Saved Document" text so that it says "Text" and type a name for the file into the "Selection" box. (By default it should come up with your home directory as the path, and the file name as "index.html". When you change the button to "Text" it will change the suggested name to "index.txt". You can change this if you want.) Then click "OK."
5. Outside of the Netscape window, in an xterm window, type:

   add nihongo
   jlpr filename
   

   where

   filename

   is whatever you typed into the field in the dialog box. (Make sure you're in whatever directory you saved the file in before you try to print.)