Re: utf8 and postscript

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

On Saturday 05 January 2008 17:45, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> Thanks for the hint!  I find that if I take my original UTF-8 
> encoded Polish graph, and put
> 
>   set encoding utf8
>   set term post eps color adobeglyphnames
> 
> at the top, it then works fine.
> 
> But this makes me wonder: if the default alternative to 
> "adobeglyphnames" doesn't work with the default postscript font, 
> why is adobeglyphnames not the default?

Because most UTF8 fonts are not from Adobe, or at least that
was my thinking.  The Adobe fonts have very few non-latin1 characters,
so if you really need UTF8 my guess is that you are more likely to
use a non-Adobe font.  But it's only a guess.   In going over Thomas
Henlich's UTF8 patch, I was focused more on access to UTF8 
greek/symbol/math fonts than on the code pages for non-latin1 European
languages. 

I suppose we could special-case the standard Adobe fontnames
  Helvetica Times-Roman Palatino Courier
but that might be more confusing than treating all fonts equivalently.

Another thought is to make the "{no}adobeglyphnames" be
a sub-option to "fontfile" rather than have it apply to all
fonts.  But I'm not sure that would work internally. 

In any case, I think the next version of the user manual should
have a separate section on fonts.  It is a perennial headache,
and not just for PostScript.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt