Re: can gnuplot do UTF-8 at all? [was: pm3d for emf terminal and point types]

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

On Sunday 10 December 2006 11:17 pm, Dr. Johannes Zellner wrote:
>
> 1. set term x11 font
> "mbfont:-efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-*-160-*-*-c-*-iso10646-1"
> doesn't display all unicode characters correctly, but the specified
> font is a perfectly valid unicode font. I left 'encoding' untouched.

I don't have that font, so I can't experiment directly.
But based on similar full names for other fonts, I think you must
change that -c- to -*-
As you show below, the easiest thing to let everything default
but the face name.

> 2. set term x11 font "mbfont:efont,14"
> works and displays all (unicode) characters correctly. But it makes
> plotting REALLY slow.  Try to rotate some 3d splot interactively,
> e.g. 'splot x*y w l' with the above font option and compare it when
> having a font spec like "9x15".

Yes, it is slow.  Exactly how slow probably depends on exactly which
version of the X libaries you are using.  On my newer machines it is
not so bad; I'm not sure how much of that is newer software and how
much is faster hardware.

> Any comments on these?

This mechanism uses the generic X11 libraries, which as you
discovered are not very efficient at handling multi-byte characters.
I really don't know why.

Several projects have implemented much cleaner handling of
multi-byte characters on top of X11.  The most relevant of these
is pango.  Pango on top of X works much more smoothly than the
native X support, although it is still a bit slow.
The use of pango is half of what makes the new wxt terminal so
nice, and why I have switched over to wxt from x11 for daily use.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA