One of the deficiencies of the deprecated plfreetype method of handling unicode fonts (used by, e.g., the wxwidgets(agg) and wingcc device drivers) is the fonts are inflexibly described by their file name which severely limits glyph choice. This contrasts with the much more flexible generic font approach in the psttf, cairo, qt, and wxwidgets(wxGC) device drivers that puts no file limits on glyph choice. (That approach is implemented via system libraries such as fontconfig which search all system font files for a suitable glyph of the right generic font type (sans, serif, etc.)
I historically built into plP_text (in plcore.c) a momentary change to generic "symbol" fonts for each unicode glyph that was designated by special PLplot encoding methods for unicode (such as "#[0x????]"). The idea was that we would use extra large "symbol" font files to give more font choice, but in practice it meant (see cmake/modules/freetype.cmake) by default we changed for the plfreetype method from whatever font file to the serif choice of font file and this wasn't much of an advantage in finding glyphs for the already deprecated plfreetype method. Furthermore, the idea was applied inconsistently (a) because the momentary font change does not occur if direct UTF-8 encoding is used instead of PLplot-specific encoding methods, and (b) because amongst the generic font drivers, psttf, qt and cairo used sans fonts for the "symbol" font while wxwidgets (wxGC) used serif (until my commit today which changed that to sans to be consistent with the rest of the generic font device drivers). Finally, the idea obviously produces incorrect font results in both the plfreetype and generic font cases unless the font being changed from was identical to symbol or serif in the plfreetype case and identical to symbol or sans in the generic font case. Anyhow, in retrospect the momentary change to the "symbol" font that I historically implemented does seem to be a bit lame, and I therefore plan to remove that font change (using #ifdef's so it is easy to restore it). Note, this fix still allows use of symbol fonts if they are specifically asked for by the user. Of course, I will reconsider removal of the momentary font change if my Debian tests or tests by those with access to other platforms shows substantial glyph-finding problems as a result of that removal for either plfreetype type or generic font type device drivers. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
