Supported encoding schemes and conversions

The encoding schemes supported by PSF for the XML data are:

• EBCDIC (single-byte only)
• ASCII (single-byte only)
• UTF-8
• UTF-16

XML data encoded in UTF-16 can use either little endian order or big endian order. PSF checks the first two bytes of the data for the Byte Order Mark. If the Byte Order Mark indicates little endian order, PSF converts the data to big endian order. PSF does not support fonts that support the little endian order.

The encoding schemes supported for font code pages in a page definition to print XML data are:

• EBCDIC (single-byte only)
• ASCII (single-byte only)
• Unicode Presentation (UTF-16 without surrogate support)

PSF checks the encoding of the XML data against the font encoding to see if the XML data needs to be converted to another encoding. PSF converts the XML data from:

• ASCII or UTF-8 to UTF-16 if the font encoding is Unicode Presentation. PSF assumes the ASCII or UTF-8 data will convert to UTF-16 data without surrogates.
• UTF-16 to UTF-8 if the font encoding is ASCII. PSF assumes the UTF-16 data will convert to the equivalent of single-byte ASCII when the data is converted to UTF-8. ASCII is a proper subset of UTF-8.

EBCDIC data requires EBCDIC fonts and, therefore, PSF does not convert it.