[Koha-devel] Multilingual label printing in Koha (praise be to Bywater!)

[Indranil Das Gupta]

Yep! the Bywater Solutions plugin by Kyle does the job nicely "outside the
box" :-)

IIRC the label printing code was last worked on by Chris N a long long time
back. As far as I can tell the non Latin printing issue is due to the PDF
library we are using. Prolly needs a rewrite for that part which requires
both time and funds :-(

-Indranil



On Thu, 30 Jun, 2022, 12:34 pm , <dcook at prosentient.com.au> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I had a problem where I couldn't print Chinese and English on barcode
> labels
> using Koha's built-in Label Creator, since it uses individual font files
> and
> I couldn't find a free and open individual font that supports both European
> and Chinese scripts.
>
> Fortunately, I recalled that Kyle @ ByWater Solutions created this plugin:
> https://github.com/bywatersolutions/koha-plugin-label-maker. It uses HTML
> and CSS to generate labels in the browser, and the browser is already
> capable of using multiple different fonts to support multiple different
> scripts. The plugin did a great job of rendering barcodes with both Chinese
> and English written on them! Thanks, Bywater Solutions, for saving the day!
>
> --
> Nerdy thoughts:
>
> If I look at the "Computed" styles in the F12 tools in Chrome on Windows
> 10,
> it says the English is rendered using the "Times New Roman" font, and it
> says that the Chinese is rendered using the "Microsoft YaHei" font. If I do
> the same thing in Microsoft Word, the English is in "Calibri" and the
> Chinese is in "DengXian". If you read
> https://fonts.google.com/noto/use#how-are-noto-fonts-organized it says "If
> you have text in multiple languages that use different scripts, either the
> app or the person who typesets the text needs to switch between the
> different fonts accordingly."
>
> I'm not an expert on fonts, so I'm not sure what would be involved with
> getting Koha's PDF libraries to use different fonts for different scripts.
> I
> don't know how Chrome and Word detect that they need to use a different
> font. I don't know if it's a map of Unicode codepoints to existing font
> mappings, or if it iterates through a list of fallbacks, or what.
>
> I probably won't go too far down this rabbit hole, since the ByWater Koha
> Plugin solved my immediate use case, but it's an interesting topic, and
> this
> is a major limitation with Koha's Label Creator, so we might want to think
> about a change in the future...
>
> David Cook
> Senior Software Engineer
> Prosentient Systems
> Suite 7.03
> 6a Glen St
> Milsons Point NSW 2061
> Australia
>
> Office: 02 9212 0899
> Online: 02 8005 0595
>
>
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