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Backward compatibility. It will refuse to die /forever/.


Also simplicity (for the printer vendor), codepages means you just take your input byte and index into an array, UTF8 means you need to implement UTF-8 decoding (which is simple but not free and now you need to deal with decoding errors) and automatic check/swap of your raster maps in the printer. This is all logic which codepages foist onto the driver developer.


Dealing with decoding errors is simple, you just substitute U+FFFD any time you hit one.




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