Re: [Plplot-devel] PLplot 5.7.2 is now available

[Andrew R. <and...@us...>]

On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 10:48:46PM -0800, Alan Irwin wrote:
> Hi Hazen:
> 
> I have downloaded plplot-5.7.2.tar.gz, checked its signature, built it,
> tested both the build tree and install tree examples. All seems well on both
> Debian stable and Ubuntu Dapper except for the same issue recently reported
> by Werner for MinGW; for both examples 7 and 23 on Ubuntu -dev psttfc gives
> the following error message:
> 
> terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
>    what():  Error returned from FT_Load_Glyph
> Aborted
> 
> Debian standard does not have these errors nor does -dev png on Ubuntu
> (which eliminates missing fonts or something wrong with libfreetype [used by
> both devices] as the cause).  Does anybody else see this issue?
> 
> Hazen, there seems to be a lot of interest in these development releases.
> Your previous effort (5.7.1) resulted in 1000+ downloads in two months.
> 
> Thanks for your continuing release efforts.

Alan,

I see this error on Ubuntu Dapper. I upgraded to Ubuntu Edgy and the
problem persists. The error message comes from lasi, but only because
FT_Load_Glyph returns an error. Supressing the fatal error in lasi means
that most of example 07 plots successfully. There are just a couple of
symbols which produce an error, and then just appear as a blank square
in the plot. It does depend slightly which font you use. Removing Arial
(the default font used) resulted in slightly fewer problems. The double
quote character still caused errors though. 

So from this I surmise it is not (just) a font problem. It appears to be
a freetype problem. Note that the plplot freetype code does not use
FT_Load_Glyph, which may be why the problem does not occur in the gd
driver.

I've search the web and found no explicit reference to this so far. I
will try and investigate further.

Andrew