![]() Otherwise, these printers will be of little use. ![]() For any Unicode-capable printers you want to deploy, there must also be a corresponding device type definition available for the various SAP releases. There are also some points to consider from the SAP side of the equation. Even upgrading current printers with special modules to support Unicode printing is problematic, since it locks you into both the module vendor and the provider of the associated devices. You’re tied to a narrow range of printer models and manufacturers, which makes it difficult to use more cost-effective or better-optioned devices from other sources. If you want to send Unicode directly from SAP, you’re limited to a small number of output devices and/or hardware vendors. This problem presents a major challenge for the user. Aside from the issue of Unicode support, there is also the problem of whether these printers have incorporated SAP-specific fonts like Andale. Not many printers can handle native Unicode in UTF-8 form. They usually only support print output involving double-byte code pages. However, these few printers are only commonly available in the Asian region. There are, of course, printers that support Asian fonts. Among other things, this means that you have to create more than one device type for each physical printer. Usually these drivers only support certain code pages. In addition, SAP only supplies a few device types (drivers) for special printers that support Asian or Cyrillic characters. If you send a document with Japanese characters to the average printer, for example, the SAP print driver will substitute any unsupported symbols with the symbol “#”. The problem is, most devices are not designed to print these double-byte characters. Two of the most vexing problems relate to device support and output drivers. But when it comes to printing documents with Unicode - especially with Asian characters - problems can still arise. In doing so, they could offer an elegant solution to handle the input and data storage of the many characters used in international languages. SAP first officially introduced Unicode support in SAP R/3 Version 4.7C. So what does this have to do with printing problems from SAP applications? SAP and Unicode Great… there are multiple ways of handling printed characters. Among other things, it is a more efficient way to depict ASCII symbol and European special characters. For presentation of Unicode in data streams like print data, XML, and HTML files, UTF-8 is often used. UTF-16 is used internally by the SAP environment, so each character uses two bytes of data. Unicode, on the other hand, provides different encodings for the display of all characters - the so-called Unicode Transformation Formats. Aside from these so-called “single-byte” code pages (which can present a maximum of 255 characters), there are also double-byte code pages for Asian characters (e.g., GB2312) that can depict over 60,000 symbols. There is, for example, a separate code page for Western Europe (ISO-8859-1 or CP1252), Eastern Europe, Cyrillic, etc. By contrast, the older code page-based approach to international character handling was only able to present a small subset of the possible symbols. The Unicode standard is a universal way for encoding and presenting all written characters from any language in the world. Yet printing problems remain, especially in large implementations that span many countries and languages. Over the years, various technologies and standards have evolved to enable printing in SAP environments. SAP applications have been around for a long time, and printed business documents have been around even longer. Cloud Migration and Infrastructure Consolidation.Secure print release for confidentiality.
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