Hi Alan, On Wed, 2010-10-06 at 18:14 +0100, Alan W. Irwin wrote: > Furthermore, I think your best workaround is not to fiddle with the > Hershey to unicode transformation yourself (since that implies you > would have to patch PLplot indefinitely), and instead let your users > know there have been some changes in the Hershey to unicode > transformation table, and they should look at example 7 results at > http://plplot.sourceforge.net/examples.php?demo=07 (which is the cairo > result) or run example 7 with -dev qtwidget for themselves for > guidance about which Hershey indices to use.
This doesn't work for us. Our users don't programme plplot calls, nor do they (very often) specify a glyph by its Hershey/Unicode. Indeed, I hit the problem with the Greek characters by having #gh in a string used as an axis label - and we actually trap out the word "theta" in strings and convert it for our users to #gh. In short, we supply, as binary executable and/or packaged source, a high-level, interactive, GUI-driven application that is used by scientists who don't need to know what plplot is, who don't need to programme in C/C++, and in many cases who don't have the appropriate administrative authority or support on their platform to install/upgrade things. If we forced them in install separately the range of 3rd party software on which our QSAS depends (plplot - and by inference cmake, cdf from NASA, qt development kits, mingw - for windows, lapack, blas, and probably a few others) our user community would shrink to zero. So we supply a source tree in which all these elements are bundled. Our configure/make system builds all these elements (well, not qt). In particular, we unpack plplot and build it ourselves without using cmake. Our users, like those of Microsoft Word, expect the software to run out of the box, and to open saved sessions that had a greek theta in a plot and to still show a greek theta in the plot. Unlike Microsoft, when something doesn't work, we fix it. Moving to plplot brought us many advantages, both in terms of freeing ourselves from the fortran interface required by pgplot and more capabilities, which we have enhanced with two main contributions (the qt driver and qsastime) that we are happy to see adopted and maintained by your team. That saves us maintenance, but it is likely that, given our user community and the nature of our application, we will continue to need to tinker a bit. In part, of course, we don't follow every update of plplot, but just the ones that make a material difference or to ensure we don't get too far behind. Regards, Steve -- +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ Professor Steven J Schwartz Phone: +44-(0)20-7594-7660 Head, Space & Atmospheric Physics Fax: +44-(0)20-7594-7772 The Blackett Laboratory E-mail: s.schwa...@imperial.ac.uk Imperial College London Office: Huxley 6M67A London SW7 2AZ, U.K. Web: www.sp.ph.ic.ac.uk/~sjs +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
