Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!adobe!greid
From: greid@adobe.com (Glenn Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Kanji PostScript ?
Message-ID: <301@adobe.COM>
Date: 27 Jan 89 03:18:38 GMT
References: <8030004@eecs.nwu.edu> <529@wucc.waseda.JUNET>
Sender: news@adobe.COM
Reply-To: greid@adobe.COM (Glenn Reid)
Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View
Lines: 28

In article <529@wucc.waseda.JUNET> KAKEHI@JPNWAS00.BITNET writes:
>In article <8030004@eecs.nwu.edu>, kato@eecs.nwu.edu (Masao Kato) writes:
>> Does anyone know about extension of PostScript for Kanji (Japanese character) ?
>
>Sorry, I can't tell you anything about Kanji Postscript.  But there is
>a good news in Japan.  Canon will start NTX to NTX/J version up from
>February.  As you can easily guess from its name, it supports kanji
>printing but I'm not sure if it's the kind of Postscrpit your're
>interested in.  The version up kit consists of a board exchange and a
>40MB external disk and is for 300000 yen.

I believe this is the Apple NTX and NTX/J, not Canon.  Anyway, the
Apple LaserWriter NTX/J PostScript printer contains an Adobe controller
which has been improved to support Kanji.  In particular, Adobe has
extended the font mechanism to handle what we call "composite fonts",
which allows a large collection of individual font dictionaries and
glyphs to be collected into a single composite font dictionary.  This
dictionary can then be used as a normal font would be, even though it
may contain 7,000 characters or more.  In conjunction with this, the
interpreter can handle many alternate encodings (2-byte encodings in
many flavors) for the Japanese and other languages.

For further information on this, please contact Adobe Systems Developer
Support and ask for the Composite Font Extensions document.  It is not
yet available on the file server, but hopefully will be soon.

Glenn Reid
Adobe Systems