TeX [was: can gnuplot do UTF-8 at all?]

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On 12/13/06, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 December 2006 04:23 am, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> >
> > TeX-based pseudo-terminals support Unicode "without any problem".
>
> Except for the problem that TeX itself doesn't know about Unicode,
> right?

TeX or pdfTeX don't natively support it, but TeX is powerful enough
that macro package can imetate utf-8 to some degree. As Petr wrote,
inputenc package does that for you.

However, XeTeX and the new version of pdfTeX (not officially released
yet; also known as luatex) natively support Unicode and
OpenType/TrueType/AAT fonts installed on the system (read as: you
don't need to hack TeX to get the most fancy fonts any more, finally
good support for arabic, left to right and other obscure scripts). But
that's not something that would make any difference to the way how
gnuplot works. (Existing terminals probably work ok with XeTeX as
well.)

> I gather that there are several recent TeX variants that do
> handle it, though.  XeTeX seems promising, but maybe it's OSX only.

Which OS are you using (which distribution)? Since May it works on
Linux and since Summer on Windows as well. (There are packages for
SuSE and Ubuntu, you can install on other flavours of linux from
source.) But that's too offtopic for the list and probably not
relevant - utf-8 works under LaTeX with the good old pdfTeX as well.

> You mention ConTeXt also, which I still haven't found the time to
> investigate, but at least it comes by default as part of the texmf
> rpm I'm using.

You can take a look at http://www.nibua-r.org/ConTeXt/PhD/.
On page 81 (numbered 65) or 85 of the thesis there are some sample
graphs done with gnuplot & ConTeXt.

The only problem with the default distribution is that ConTeXt is
usually old (2002) (Debian has just made a big step forward and their
package is the only one that I know which includes recent/decent
ConTeXt) and tetex is not being maintained any more either, but one
can in theory only replace the old files with the new ones from
www.pragma-ade.com and regenerate formats. (Lyx doesn't support
ConTeXt.)

I would indeed be very grateful if someone could try the context
terminal out once in the future. There's really no hurry since there
will be no 4.4 release for a while, but I would like to get some
feedback from the gnuplot team as well.

Mojca