gnuplot-beta

Consistent escape mechanism for Unicode characters?

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

With the addition of UTF-8 support to the postscript terminal,
we are reaching the point where users might logically want to
specify individual Unicode characters in a terminal-independent
way.  If your environment is natively UTF-8 this shouldn't be a problem.
But some people may not have that option.

In particular I am thinking of the FAQ entries for
Planck's constant and the solar mass symbol.

For example
	set label "Planks's constant = ℏ"

Currently the SVG and PNG drivers simply pass through the escaped
sequence to the underlying libraries, which correctly look for the
corresponding Unicode character in the current font.

Would it be reasonable to make this same form acceptable to the
wxt, post, x11 and other terminals?

-- 
Ethan A Merritt

Re: Consistent escape mechanism for Unicode characters?

[<HBB...@t-...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:
> For example
> 	set label "Planks's constant = ℏ"

> Would it be reasonable to make this same form acceptable to the
> wxt, post, x11 and other terminals?

I doubt it.  The SGML group of formats is quite alone in using '&' as an 
escape character.  Exporting this usage to other formats is bound to 
create tons of problem --- for starters, we already use it in enhanced 
text to signify "phantom" whitespace.

I tend to think Java's \u210f would make more sense, particularly 
because it would be a better fit into our overall C-based escape 
character scheme.