[Xprint] Monospaced font in Thunderbird/Mozilla mail (episode 2)

[Jan Willem Stumpel]

In my message of September 19th I wrote:

> It seems that the file userContent.css can also be used to 
> obtain monospaced printout of mail messages from Mozilla and 
> derivatives, making the print preview agree with the actual 
> printout.
> 
> Inside the @media print selector you just add
> 
> .moz-text-plain { font-family: 'Courier New',courier,monospace
>  !important; }

But this is not /quite/ the solution yet. At least not with the
Debian version of xprint which I have now:

  ii  xprt-common     0.0.9.final.001-6
  ii  xprt-xprintorg  0.0.9.final.001-6

I get a monospaced, Courier-like print-out alright (and I also get
other UTF-8 characters, like Japanese characters), but the
problem is that some accented *Western* letters do not get printed
at all. E.g. áíúéó is printed as áíú. No more é, ó. And the á, í,
and ú are printed somewhat bold, unlike the un-accented letters.
This is in a UTF-8 locale.

Question 1: can anyone confirm/reproduce this?

(NOTE: this should be tested with the userContent.css
modification. If userContent.css does not contain the
.moz-text-plain entry, all accented letters are printed OK -- but
in a proportional font, and the whole object of the exercise was
to get monospaced print-out).

 From perusal of mozilla.ps (when I choose to "print to file")　　
it appears that that the "normal" letters are printed in a font
called /CourierNewPSMT_iso8859-7 (why iso8859-7 is used is a
mystery in itself), while accented letters (in so far as they are
printed at all) are printed using /Courier10PitchBT-Roman_iso8859-1.

So even the above entry in the userConfig.css has not quite
succeeded in taming xprint's errant font selection mechanism.

After some experiments I found that things improve when you
specify a font (in userContent.css) which makes it impossible for
xprint to confuse Courier New with any of the other Couriers
around. E.g. the following both work (restore printing of é, ó,
and leave accented letters in the same font as non-accented ones):

.moz-text-plain {
 font-family: 'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono' !important;
    }

and

.moz-text-plain {
 font-family: 'FreeMono' !important;
    }

(of course, you must have the mentioned fonts installed).

Question 2: can anyone confirm/reproduce *this*?

A last point: it seems that the latest versions of xprint no
longer contain .pfm files in

/usr/share/Xprint/xserver/C/print/models/PSdefault/fonts

(so it is no longer necessary to remove them, in order to have
headers & footers printed properly). Was this an intended change,
as far as anyone knows?

Regards, Jan