On 2010-03-21 23:22-0700 David MacMahon wrote: > FWIW, I get a square bullet on the xcairo device for symbol 850 on Mac OS X. > This is the same glyph that gucharmap shows for unicode symbol 0x2219 in the > "symbol" font. Some other fonts have round bullets for this symbol. Can one > specify a font for use with plsym?
For our modern unicode font handling we only specify the most generic information (sans font, serif font, etc.) and let other libraries (e.g., fontconfig) do their work which is to find the "best" font glyph that represents that unicode symbol from the selection of system fonts in the generic class (sans or whatever) that we specify. So the proper thing to do here is to use gucharmap to find a glyph that you like. If you search for "bullet operator" there you will find 0x2219. If you then look at the generic sans font, fontconfig will pick something that has a high weight in the fontconfig configuration. In my case, that is DejaVu Sans (right click on the symbol to see the actual font being selected for the gucharmap display). That renders a square glyph here. However, if you choose generic serif instead, the font actually chosen (here) is DejaVu Serif, and that renders a circular glyph here. Were your above results for generic sans, generic serif, or something more specific? For best match with what our cairo and qt device drivers do, always use the generic gucharmap font choices. I suspect the simple answer to Jerry's original question is he was using sans when he should have being specifying serif. Another possibility is that "U+2219 BULLET OPERATOR" is not really what he wants. In that case he should try some of the other cross-references given by guchapmap in the character details for bullet operator e.g., • U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT • U+2022 BULLET • U+2024 ONE DOT LEADER Or he might just want to use the gucharmap search function for bullet or dot or circle. For example, if he just wanted a black circle, then the find function in gucharmap should quickly find U+25CF BLACK CIRCLE. Let's say, he likes the look of that with generic sans and/or serif. Then he could follow example 23 (or the documentation) about how to specify 0x25CF with a PLplot escape sequence. It could also cut and paste any glyph from gucharmap directly into his code (which actually copies the UTF-8 string for that glyph into his code). The PLplot library knows exactly what to do with UTF-8 input strings (examples 24 and 26 use this method), and the result should be exactly the same as what can be seen with gucharmap. Bottom line here, I think the gucharmap application is a wonderful application in general and also a wonderful adjunct to PLplot. It makes sense of what is going on with the system font choices for each glyph and it also makes it easy to choose PLplot symbols by using a PLplot escape sequence (the example 23 method) or UTF-8 directly (by cutting and pasting, the method used in examples 24 and 26). I hope these remarks help Jerry and anyone else who is looking for special glyphs they want to put into their PLplot strings. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
