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Is there a solution to printing unicode characters from gvim?

See this:

enter image description here

Results in this print result

enter image description here

(Using a Linux setup and Vim 8.0.)

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  • 2
    It looks like your printing setup expects a different character set, or doesn't support unicode at all
    – Martin Tournoij
    Apr 11, 2017 at 19:59
  • What do you get from :set enc? fenc? penc? (as one command)
    – Amadan
    Apr 12, 2017 at 4:17
  • In the example above, where I did not save to a file, I get: encoding=utf-8 fileencoding= printencoding=
    – LaTechneuse
    Apr 12, 2017 at 9:26
  • If I execute set penc=utf8 the problem in the printed output persists.
    – LaTechneuse
    Apr 12, 2017 at 9:27

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Per this Stackoverflow:4586628 Q/A, How do you pipe a vim buffer through lpr?, I have this entry in my ~/.vimrc:

nmap PpP :%w !lpr -o lpi=8 -o cpi=14<CR><CR>

that replaces my old entry,

nmap PpP :ha<CR>

(:ha = :hardcopy).

Using :ha, Neovim was not printing Greek letters, ... even though my (Arch Linux) locale was

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
...

and I have this line, near the top of my ~/.vimrc,

scriptencoding utf-8

[Printing is system-dependent, not vim-dependent.]

I added the lpi (lines-per-inch) and cpi (characters-per-inch) to jiggle my font size to that similar to as what I was getting with the :ha command (I measured/counted with an actual ruler), and run it as a PpP command/shortcut, added to my ~/.vimrc, whenever I want to print the current buffer.

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Send the buffer to the browser by converting to HTML, then print from there:

:TOhtml | w | !open -a Safari %

For example I have this in vim: enter image description here

If I type 

:ha

I get this: enter image description here

But when I send it to the browser I get this (with color scheme!):

enter image description here

I have this in my .vimrc, which deletes the new html buffer and stored file:

nnoremap <F2> <ESC> :TOhtml <bar> w <bar> !open -a Safari % <CR> <bar> ZQ <CR> <bar> execute '!rm %:p.html' <CR>
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Vim seems to produce fairly simple PostScript through the :hardcopy command. PostScript itself has no understanding of Unicode, and so having it render "special characters" properly is a complicated process involving intimate knowledge of fonts, etc.

I filed a bug about this, FWIW: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/8935

I the meantime, I think the best solution is to use an external program to produce your printable output. For instance paps (link) converts UTF-8 text to PostScript. You can, of course, run this external program from inside Vim using your own command, as described in another answer.

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