Re: utf8 and postscript

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

On Saturday 05 January 2008 20:09, you wrote:
> 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?
> >
> > If you really need UTF8 my guess is that you are 
> > more likely to use a non-Adobe font...
> 
> 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 am agreeable to changing the default to "adobeglyphnames".
We'll see if anyone notices and/or complains.

The UTF8 support is very new and I think it will end up needing 
additional tweaks anyhow.  I am working [slowly] on a modification that
would allow you to specify a separate "mathfont" when you select the
terminal. Characters in Unicode pages 0 and 1 would use the primary font,
characters above that would use the math font instead.  That is useful
because none of the Adobe fonts that I know of contain both the complete
set of European language characters and a useful set of math/physics
symbols.  

You can of course switch fonts explicitly for the special characters,
but that kind of defeats the purpose of using UTF8 text strings.
The alternative right now is to use a single, non-Adobe font that
contains a larger set of characters.  That's where the issue of
non-Adobe glyph names came in.

I am largely fumbling in the dark here.  Before Thomas Henlich came
in with a patch to support UTF8, I didn't even realize it was possible.
Even with Thomas' help I haven't managed to persuade it to use any
CJK font.  As you point out, UTF8 "just works" in the newer formats
like svg and pdf.  So it make not be worth the struggle to get more
than a minimal implementation working in the postscript terminals.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt