On 2008-12-10 23:45-0800 Alan W. Irwin wrote: > On 2008-12-10 15:32-0700 Doug Hunt wrote: >> I'm having trouble getting my hands around example 23--I can't get any of the >> 'c' examples to give correct comparison output except 'xwin'. I get some >> bogus or missing characters for all other driver types. Do you have any >> hints as to how to which 'c' example you use for comparison and how >> to get it to work correctly? My plplot installation may be missing >> something required to get all the character sets to work. > > fontconfig is essential for managing Linux fonts > in an intelligent way so make sure that package is installed.
Hi Doug: That was a horribly incomplete and misleading answer written in haste so let me try again. There are four different font systems on PLplot. (1) Hershey fonts. These are the historical fonts used by PLplot, but they have only a limited number of glyphs and generally look ugly on pixel devices so any device that has access to better fonts tends to only use these as a backup. However, Hershey fonts tend to be the most reliable since they are internal to PLplot and have no external dependencies. -dev xwin is one device which uses only Hershey fonts which is why it worked for you. (2) Adobe Type 1 fonts. These are used by default for -dev psc and therefore all the comparisons we do with ctest. So the answer to how to get -dev psc to work properly is to install Adobe Type 1 fonts on your system or some clone of them. On Debian, the package name is gsfonts and it describes itself this way: Fonts for the Ghostscript interpreter(s) These are free look-alike fonts of the Adobe PostScript fonts. Recommended for all flavors of Ghostscript (gs-gpl, gs-afpl and gs-esp). Type 1 fonts look really nice, but they have a major downside which is such fonts can effectively address only 255 glyph possibilities so the glyph coverage in gsfonts is just barely adequate for English language and mathematical symbols. Type 1 glyph-finding is really simple so that is done directly without relying on fontconfig. So I am pretty sure any -dev psc font trouble you had was because gsfonts (or some other equivalent font package that supplies the standard Adobe fonts) was not installed. (3) TrueType fonts accessed via our plfreetype interface to libfreetype. The prototypical devices which use this method are the png, jpeg, and gif devices associated with libgd. TrueType fonts look great and also can have very large numbers (potentially up to 2^31) glyphs in them. So they are ideal for PLplot. However, the current status is that plfreetype does not use fontconfig to handle all the large number of font possibilites so we are stuck with a really clumsy method of specifying fonts by directory and file name (see http://plplot.sourceforge.net/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.9.0/characters.html for details). If you could not get -dev png to work properly, you probably had some problem with configuring the file names and directory locations to be consistent with where TrueType fonts are installed on your system. It's also possible you are missing TrueType fonts altogether. On Debian the name of a package that provides many TrueType fonts is ttf-freefont. It describes itself as follows: A set of free high-quality TrueType fonts covering the UCS character set. These fonts are similar to the (in)famous Helvetica, Times and Courier fonts. (4) TrueType fonts accessed via fontconfig. The prototypical devices which use this method are the cairo devices (via libpango and libcairo which use libfreetype and fontconfig) and also psttf (via libLASi, libpango, and libcairo which use libfreetype and fontconfig). Specifying fonts for these devices is really simple. Our code specifies a generic font type (e.g., "sans") and fontconfig figures out the rest depending on what TrueType fonts have been installed on the user's system. Assuming you have an equivalent to ttf-freefont installed, if you could not get any of the cairo devices (e.g., -dev pscairo) to work then you probably have a problem with libpango, libcairo, and/or fontconfig). A similar situation holds for -dev psttf except that libLASi is also thrown into the mix of possible non-working external dependencies. Hope this overview helps you to get the various PLplot font systems to work properly on your system. It's well worth it to take some trouble with this since the results you can obtain look spectacular compared to what PLplot results looked like a couple of years ago with just Hershey fonts. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SF.Net email is Sponsored by MIX09, March 18-20, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The future of the web can't happen without you. Join us at MIX09 to help pave the way to the Next Web now. Learn more and register at http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;208669438;13503038;i?http://2009.visitmix.com/ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
