Help with Japanese Printing.

[Sebastien Leclair <splice@d-refuge.net>]

Hi all,

  I've been going crazy trying to setup japanese printing on 
my box. I am running potato, nearly all upgraded. I have 
japanese input setup, it works fine. I can display japanese 
fine. If I print to a postscript file with mozilla, I can 
read the japanese characters fine with gs or xv or anything. 
The japanese support was all installed using apt.

  However, when I try to print, I _ALWAYS_ get the empty 
boxes instead of characters. I have been banging my head on 
the wall, my fist on the screen, and my foot on the tower, 
but no results have been forthcoming. I've played with 
packages, "upgraded" ghostscript to gs-aladdin-vflib using a 
DebianJP source, gs complained of not finding Times or 
Courier fonts and died. I reinstalled gsfonts to no avail. I 
reinstalled my original version of gs (6.51-5) and the CJK 
support files, japanese cmaps, etc. I tried printing from 
netscape with LANG set to ja_JP.eucJP. No change. I've read 
Craig Oda's file on Nihongo Linux. It seems horribly outdated 
(the information on printing is dated from 1998). I am on the 
verge of breakdown. I dearly love linux, but all I needed to 
do to print japanese on windows was install the japanese 
support files and then print away. This is crazy and it's 
getting on my nerves.

  I have a dream. A dream of just doing apt-get for a few 
packages, maybe change some configuration files a bit, then 
printing from anywhere and getting japanese characters out
 of my printer. Is that possible? Will it ever be?

  I'm running CUPS 1.1.12 compiled from source, gimp-print 
drivers (4.2.0) and am using a newly bought epson stylus C80. 
Kernel is 2.4.9 (if it matters). Mozilla is 0.9.7 binary.

  Can anyone help me with this? If you can print japanese 
yourself but don't want to spend the time helping me 
troubleshoot this, can you at least give me an outline of what 
you did, what you installed, from where, etc, to get it working???

  I'll be dead grateful for any help, any help at all. I can't 
read much japanese, I don't speak it well at all, but I bought a 
printer so I could print out my homework and study materials. Fat 
help that's been so far.

Regards,
Sebastien L.