infundibulum

Ah, the endless confusion of all the little squiggles on the intarweb.

I bought a Samsung laser printer, which is really quite nice. It’s just black and white, which is fine for me, and it’s really fast, and the quality is much better than the last two crappy inkjets I’ve owned.

Thing is though… fonts. I vaguely remember reading some stuff about “where the fonts live” being different between inkjets and laser printers… or “real postscript”only being available in laser printers… or something like that.

Bottom line: sigh.

Original text:

What my printer printed:

Hallo Welt! German 你好，世界！ Chinese Hello world! English Olá mundo! Portuguese Hallo wereld! Dutch こんにちは 世界! Japanese Καλημέρα κόσμε! Greek Merhaba dünya! Turkish Hola mundo! Spanish Halo dunia! Bahasa Indonesia Helló Világ! Hungarian Salut le monde! French Hallo verden! Norwegian/Bokmal Chào thế giới! Vietnamese Hejsan, världen! Swedish Привет, мир! Russian Tere, maailm! Estonian 안녕, 세상! Korean Saluton Mondo! Esperanto Ahoj svet! Czech Hylô byd! Welsh Terve maailma! Finnish Laba ryta, pasauli! Lithuanian Halló heimur! Icelandic Sveika, pasaule! Latvian 哈佬世界! Cantonese สวัสดีราคาถูก! Thai Hallo, wrâld Frisian Ave, Munde! Latin

It’s so RANDOM. Okay, so I can determine that there are missing fonts for several Asian languages by looking at this stuff. But what about Greek? Why does the “mu” show up but the rest is just blank?

And where do I look to start debugging such a problem? Which kinds of fonts does my printer “understand”?

In situations like this I generally think to myself… uh… I’ll solve this later.

And then I don’t.