Hi Alan Ok as I suspected it is a qt issue and I agree that the qt3 Oct 2010, at 21:01, "dabergs...@comcast. guys mostly make positive improvements - although the migration of our code from Qt3 to Qt4 was far from painless. Since we bundle plplot with our software and deal with a variety of users who won't want to fetch/install alternate qt installations we'll run with my workaroumd for the time being. Thanks for the confirmation that it should work on newer installations - I may check my own qt installation to see if I can configure it to pick up the necessary fonts.
It leaves me with a more philosophical and aesthetic question that I pose without malice: Should plplot draw it's Greek theta from a script-like font when all the other Greek symbols (bar uppercase upsilon) are drawn from the default sans serif font? Would it look strange to a Greek person to see a word spelled with this mixture of fonts? I suspect I'm the only one who might have noticed :-) Regards Steve ----------- Steve Schwartz Space and Atmospheric Physics Imperial College London Tel 020 7594 7660 On 5 Oct 2010, at 19:00, "Alan W. Irwin" <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
