CHCP Problem with German Umlauts äöü

[jonas30]

Hey together,

vDos is exactly what I was looking for. With the help of Readme.txt, Printing.txt and the entries of the forum I got the old calculating program of my dad running.
To the problem:
- It is a german program with umlauts (äöü)
- With chcp 850 umlauts in the program work, but I do have characters like a smiley or stuff aside words that are written bold or italics and the edges of the program are messed up with characters like Ǻ or other non west-european characters. The bigger problem is: Umlauts are not on the printed page.
- Tried chcp 1252 and 65001, edges are not that messed up, but still not presented as meant to. Problem with bold or italics is the same. Worst: Printed page still doesn't have umlauts.
- When using chcp 1252 or 65001 vDos says that a few characters are not defined in the font. But using a unicode font doesn't change anything and the message is still the same.
- Tried a unicode font for the printing as well, still no umlauts

--> Most important thing for me is to get the umlauts to the printed page

I hope I explained it well. Would be very happy about help.

Thank you very much!

Have a nice day.

[Jos]

All TTF files are Unicode based, also the internal one of vDos. Codepage 1252 indeed misses 5 character definitions.

Codepage 850 (or 437) is what you need. If strange characters are displayed instead of corners and the like, add FONT = - to config.txt.

vDos doesn’t display characters bold or italic, so not sure what you mean with that.

By default vDos uses the same font for displaying and printing text. If the printout is incorrect, submit the #LPT1.ASC file so that can be reproduced.

Jos

[jonas30]

Hey Jos,

thanks four your reply.
"Font = -" actually did the trick for the messed up corners. Thank you!

You will find the #LPT1.ASC in the attachment as well. Also the .txt and a .pdf of the document. Every strange character you see is an umlaut (äöü).
I used chcp 850 and standard font (Consolas)

I can show you a picture of the bold & italics thing as well, but its not that important right now. I would be very happy to print the umlauts.

Thank you and nice evening.


E&k0G&l0O

&a226H(8U(s0p10h0s0b4099T(s0p10h0s0b4099T
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H(8U(s0p12h0s0b4099T
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226H
&a226HIhre Nachricht vom        Ihr Zeichen              Unser Zeichen         (8U(s0p10h0s0b4099TDatum(s0p10h0s0b4099T(8U(s0p12h0s0b4099T
&a226H.                         .                        .                  (8U(s0p10h0s0b4099T 05.11.21(s0p10h0s0b4099T(8U(s0p12h0s0b4099T
&a226H(8U(s0p10h0s0b4099T(s0p10h0s0b4099T(8U(s0p12h0s0b4099T
&a226H(8U(s0s10hs3BANGEBOT (8U(s0p10h0s0b4099T       (8U(s0p10h0s0b4099TKunde:                   Angebot: 088888(s0p10h0s0b4099T(8U(s0p12h0s0b4099T
&a226HSehr geehrter Herr......,
&a226Hwir danken f╧r Ihre Anfrage und unterbreiten Ihnen wunschgem╠▐ unser Angebot.
&a226H------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
&a226HPosition  Menge/Einh. Bezeichnung                       Einheitspreis/EUR   Gesamtpreis/EUR  
&a226H------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
&a226H
&a226H
&a226HTest ╬╧╬
&a226H╠╧╬Muster w╧chs
&a226H
&a226H





















&a1786H&a4786H

&a226H
&a226H6 Arbeitseinheiten = 1 Stunde&l1H

Attachments:

LPT1.asc (1.33 KB)

LPT1.txt (2.53 KB)

Muster.pdf (12.93 KB)

[Jos]

Strange things going on with the printer output. Should be correct if the screen display is.

For now you could install the PCL6 program as mentioned in Printing.pdf.

I’ll have a closer look what causes this, you’re the first German with umlaut problems…

Jos

[jonas30]

Thank you for your help. I know umlauts only used in Germany, so you don't find much about it online.
The umlauts shown correctly on screen display, everything looks fine there.

I tried PCL6 but I get a the message "PCL6.exe could not convert to PDF...". I will try to fix this for now.

Thanks, and have a nice weekend.

[Jos]

The error message would be “PCL6.exe could not convert printjob to PDF”.
No idea why PCL6 would fail, I had no problems with it at converting your .asc file. Perhaps the PDF file to create is opened by another program.

You could execute the associated command by hand at the Windows command line by: PCL6.exe -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o#lpt1.pdf #lpt1.asc. That should then show what’s going wrong.

To the misprinting umlauts: Your program instructs the printer to use the Roman-8 Symbol Set. The HP specific code page differs from any known to DOS or Windows, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Roman.

ü is for instance 0x81 in code page 850, but 0xCF in HP Roman-8. So your program translates 0x81 occurrences in the text to 0xCF when printing.
The program would be specifically designed for use with HP laser printers, or else there would be an option to not translate characters or choose a non HP printer like Epson compatible.

Jos

[jonas30]

The HP specific code page differs from any known to DOS or Windows, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Roman.

This was the advice I needed! It works now!
Inside the program I found an option to change the printer-driver. It was an HP-Driver, I tried Epson and it works.

You really helped me out.

I'm going to tell my Dad he needs to buy the Pro-Version.

Thank you sir and have a nice weekend.

[Jos]

I forgot: You could also use that same HP-driver with the vDos RAW print option in combination with a Laser printer that supports PCL.

Jos

[jonas30]

Thats a good idea as well.
You helped me to understand this program. Now I was able to change a few things I always wanted to.
Many thanks.

We can close this thread and maybe move it to "Printing", wasn't sure where to ask at the beginning.