On 2010-10-05 13:02+0100 Steve Schwartz wrote: > [...]Gucharmap shows both > the symbols and alternatives, and the xcairo driver finds them, so I > guess they reside somehow on my system but not accessed by my version of > qt (4.5.3).
I used to encounter this same difficulty (Qt was not as good at finding system fonts as xcairo and gucharmap). I speculate that older versions of Qt used their own library for finding system fonts and not the standard fontconfig library that is used by xcairo and gucharmap or else Qt used fontconfig in a poorly configured way. However, for Qt-4.6.3 (the version that comes with Debian testing) I have not encountered this issue. For example, the Hershey numbers below are all rendered fine with example 7 and -dev qtwidget. > Hershey numbers plplot5.9.7 unicode change to this > 46, 546 0x03d2 0x03a5 Upsilon > 534 0x03d1 0x03b8 theta > 98, 684, 2184 0x03f5 0x03b5 epsilon > 686, 2186 0x03d5 0x03c6 phi variant As you can see from Section 2.28 of our release announcement, later versions of Qt seem to solve a number of issues we see for earlier versions of Qt so the fix for this font-finding issue appears to be just one more fix in the series of Qt improvements that also doesn't seem to have introduced any regressions (at least up to 4.6.3). So TrollTech/Nokia seem to have a pretty good track record for constantly improving Qt4. The Qt download site at http://qt.nokia.com/downloads/ gives you access to the latest Qt version (currently 4.7.0) in binary form. If that version works well for you (i.e., solves the above issue without introducing any regressions), then you might want to recommend it to your QSAS users that don't have access to Qt-4.6.3 or above from their distribution. Alternatively, you could temporarily deploy the above workaround until essentially all distros have updated to 4.6.3 or above. Finally, these issues remind me again that plpoin and plsym access unicode glyphs in an indirect and extremely limited way. Therefore, I have decided it is long past time we introduced a new function plglyph(n, x, y, ucs4) which allowed plotting glyphs corresponding to the ucs4 index for those drivers which are unicode aware. Such a function would allow users full and direct access to the extremely wide variety of generic sans and serif glyphs that are available on their system for unicode-aware device drivers like qt (with Qt-4.6.3 or later) or cairo. I will try implementing a first cut at plglyph later today. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/beautyoftheweb _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
