Re: utf8 and postscript

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Sat, 5 Jan 2008, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> On Saturday 05 January 2008 17:45, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > 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...

OK, I see your point.  From my point of view, however, the 
attraction of the UTF-8 encoding is not so much that it offers 
access to truly arcane characters (though that is nice in itself) 
but rather that it enables the programmer to disregard differences 
between locales.

With the current pngcairo and pdfcairo terminals one can include 
UTF-8 encoded strings in a plot file (be they plain ASCII, 
Italian, Polish, or whatever) and things will "just work" (given a 
decent font); we don't have to mess with alternate 
iso_8859_whatever's.  This is very nice.

It would be great if things worked equally nicely on feeding UTF-8 
encoded input to the PostScript terminal, but I understand that's 
not trivial to arrange.

(I also understand that however nicely the handling of encodings 
is set up, the output will contain blanks if the chosen font 
doesn't actually contain the glyphs that are requested.)

Allin Cottrell