On 2010-10-05 20:29+0100 Schwartz, Steven J wrote: > 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 :-) Actually, I notice these things as well, but that was a deliberate change. If you look at the 600 section or 2100 section of example 7 with -dev xwin (i.e, Hershey fonts), you will see that there are two versions of episilon, theta, and phi available for the Hershey fonts. I changed the Hershey to unicode transformation to match those two variations of the three glyphs as closely as possible, and I have just confirmed that sections 600 and 2100 of example 7 give Greek letter variants for the qt and cairo devices that are in at least the same spirit of the Greek letter variants you see for -dev xwin. In other words, the point of plsym (and plpoin) for unicode-aware devices is to match what is done for the Hershey devices (whether right or wrong) as closely as possible for the best backwards compatibility. That is, if people went out of their way to use what they considered to be the best variation of Greek letters with Hershey devices, they could rely on that behaviour continuing with unicode-aware devices. Note also these Greek-letter variations are all available in the same font. So it is not a matter of suddenly changing fonts in the middle of a string. Instead, it is using the same font with different Hershey and therefore UCS4 indices representing different variant forms of Greek letters depending upon what the user wants to do. All this will be much clearer with the planned plglyph functionality. There, you will get whatever unicode glyph corresponds to the UCS4 index you specify. So typically you would window-shop in gucharmap until you find a glyph you like taking into account all variants mentioned in the character details. Then you use the UCS4 index of that glyph directly in the call to plglyph for your plot. Of course, the user of plglyph will still be subject to possible mistakes in how a given font designer renders the glyph. Also, the qt and cairo devices use generic fonts where an external library (e.g., fontconfig for cairo) decides on the best sans or serif choice to represent the glyph. That potentially means you could get several different fonts used in the same text string if a higher-ranked font had a lot of glyphs missing so you had to fall back to a lower-ranked fonts for some of the glyphs. But in practice that happens rarely since most OS's only deploy True-Type font choices with relatively large glyph coverage. To end on a philosphical note, I used to ignore fonts altogether back in the dark ages when there was no choice other than Hershey for PLplot. But I have become completely enthused about fonts now that PLplot gives access to such a wide variety of them that represent ~500 years of artistic and mathematical tradition. Totally cool! 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
