Printter Configuration (SPAD)

Every printer in transaction SPAD has a "device type" assigned. Device types used by the spooler for printing support only one single specific output character set. All text from the form has to be converted (using SAP's built-in character conversion mechanism) to this output character set.

A character set can typically support either a single language (e.g. Shift-JIS which supports only Japanese) or a set of languages (e.g. ISO 8859-1, which supports Western-European languages). It is possible that a given language (such as German) can be supported by several output character sets, e.g. you may use either ISO 8895-1 (Latin-1) or ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) to represent German text. This is so because both character sets contain the special characters used in German.

Example: HPLJ4000 is a HP LaserJet device type supporting the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set. ISO 8859-1 can be used to represent e.g. Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish but NOT Russian or Japanese.

As a consequence, it is ok to use HPLJ4000 to print English, German French etc. but not for Japanese or Russian.

Notes:
The spool information is stored in the database table TSP03D (Spool: Device description)

If you export to PDF file, you should choose the printer with device type as 'PDFUC' (I solved the Turkish characters problem when exporting to pdf)