If you are using a different character set you can create your own encoding files. For example, if you are working on a PC that uses the Slavic character set (code page 852) you might want to create an encoding file for that character set so that your printed tables match those you display on your screen.

Creating encoding files requires some knowledge of PostScript, but the general procedure is as follows.

First, make a list of the characters in your character set that print differently to the way they appear on your screen (mostly, these characters will appear as blanks in the printed output). These are the characters for which translations are required. Normally these are the characters 127 to 255 which form the extended ASCII character set: characters 0 to 31 are not used for keyboard characters, and characters 32 to 126 (the standard ASCII character set) are common to all code pages.

Create a new encoding file with an appropriate name and a .fen extension. You can use cp850.fen as a template.

For each character requiring translation, write an Encoding statement that defines the character’s decimal value and the name of the PostScript character or symbol you want to print in its place. For a list of character and symbol names for all standard PostScript fonts, see the Adobe PostScript Reference Manual.

An alternative to creating an encoding file is to place all the encoding information in the Quantum job’s PostScript format file as user-defined code, as described in the next section.