Werner, Alan, Thanks for diving into this, seems indeed a lot of work.
Think it is better to spent your time in the other fonts (like was done in the WxWidgets driver) then solving something that will go away anyhow. Thanks, Hans -----Original Message----- From: Werner Smekal [mailto:sme...@iap.tuwien.ac.at] Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 22:24 To: Alan W. Irwin; Rijneke, Hans H SIEP-EPT-RIS Cc: plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Plplot-general] Text plotting Hi, > > Here is what I found. For -dev xwin; -dev psc -drvopt text=0; -dev png > -drvopt text=0; and -dev wxwidgets -drvopt freetype=0 the underscore is > replaced by a (very) short dash. All those cases involve our traditional > Hershey fonts. From this evidence I believe there is something > fundamentally wrong with those fonts for the underscore character. > > One possibility was that our binary form of Hershey fonts somehow got > clobbered in the underscore position accidentally in our CVS days, in the > CVS to svn transition, or during the svn era since. However, that turns > out > not to be the case. I just (revision 9370) tweaked our build system to > optionally (by default this is turned OFF) build programmes to generate > the > binary form of our Hershey fonts. (This was an interesting historical > exercise. I consulted the plplot-5.0.0 build directions [from our build > system from three generations ago!] to help figure out how to build those > programmes.) See fonts/README for directions on how to use our build > system > to build the programmes to generate our Hershey fonts). When I ran those > programmes, the results were absolutely identical with data/plstnd5.fnt > and > data/plxtnd5.fnt that were generated more than 8 years ago. > > Another possibility is the directions for creating the Hershey underscore > glyph are just plain wrong. (It could be missing as well, but then I > don't > think you would be seeing the short dash.) I had a look at the code in > the > fonts subdirectory that generates the Hershey fonts, and it is > essentially > undocumented. Therefore, it is going to take some effort to figure out, > for > example, the correspondence between any given glyph (such as underscore), > and the data (pen positions I assume for drawing the glyph) that is > given in > the source code. I don't have time for such an effort (especially > because > our Hershey fonts are gradually being replaced by TrueType or Type 1 > fonts > for most of our devices). However, if somebody wants to make the effort > to > figure out the Hershey underscore problem, I would be happy to apply the > fix. I also have other things now on my todo list, but some time ago I was interested what I could find on the internet about the Hershey fonts, and I found some links which may be helpful: * http://www.codeproject.com/KB/GDI/hersheyfont.aspx * http://emergent.unpythonic.net/software/hershey * http://www.efg2.com/Lab/OtherProjects/Hershey.htm - this seems to be an editor, which allows to edit hershey fonts HTH, Werner -- Dr. Werner Smekal Institut fuer Allgemeine Physik Technische Universitaet Wien Wiedner Hauptstr 8-10 A-1040 Wien Austria DVR-Nr: 0005886 email: sme...@iap.tuwien.ac.at web: http://www.iap.tuwien.ac.at/~smekal phone: +43-(0)1-58801-13463 (office) +43-(0)1-58801-13469 (laboratory) fax: +43-(0)1-58801-13499 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list Plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
