Unicode printing in vim

Question

I am working with text files that contain a lot of unicode characters (≼, ⊓, ⊔, ...). Vim displays them fine, but when I print they are replaced by a generic character. Gedit prints them without problem, but it's a bit of a pain to launch another editor just to print.

Is there a way to get vim (on Linux/Gnome) to print properly? I tried using vim-gnome, in hope that it would use the same infrastructure as gedit, but it does not.

Answer 1

Vim is only able to use 8-bit encoding for printing. If there is encoding that includes all those characters all you need is to use

set printencoding={encoding}

If there is not then you can’t print it from vim directly. You can use :TOhtml command suggested by @DaoWen, do

:TOhtml
:w /tmp/print.html
:!command-that-makes-browser-print-a-file(I-do-not-know-one) /tmp/print.html
:!rm /tmp/print.html

. You can also use my formatvim plugin to print this to pdf through latex (don’t forget to file bug reports: latex-xcolor output is untested):

:Format format latex-xcolor to /tmp/print.tex
:!pdflatex /tmp/print.tex && lp /tmp/print.pdf && rm /tmp/print.*

(you can use html output as well, but that will not make me know a command to print it). Of course, you can map these to a single key.

Answer 2

Try using the :TOhtml command to convert your document to output your buffer in HTML format. You should be able to print the resulting file from your browser.