Re: gnuplot 4.2 fails to run gretl files

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

On Sun, 12 Apr 2009, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> On Sunday 12 April 2009, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > On Sun, 12 Apr 2009, snvv wrote:
> > > Problem:
> > > When I try to create a graph it fails
> > >
> > > Operating System:
> > > Operating System Debian sid
> > > gretl ver. 1.8.0
> > > gnuplot ver 4.2 patchlevel 5 ...
> > >
> > > gnuplot: using libgd png driver
> > > stderr: 'Could not find/open font when opening font "arial", using
> > > internal non-scalable font
> > > ' ...
> > > Additional comments
> > > The first line of the created gnuplot file is:
> > >
> > > set term png truecolor small size 680,400
> >
> > This is primarily a bug with the libgd installation, which can't
> > find the arial font.
>
> I wouldn't call that a libgd installation problem.

I mean that if a distribution is packaging libgd, they should
either patch it to look for fonts in the right place for that
distribution or set the appropriate environment variable, rather
than installing a semi-functional library.  Lots of people on
Debian and Debian-derived Linux variants run into the issue
of gnuplot being unable to respect a TrueType font setting when
using the libgd png driver.  IMO this should work "out of box".

Third-party programs such as gretl have to try to work around this
problem, but the work-arounds are error-prone.

Personally I would be very pleased to see the cairo-based png
driver in an official gnuplot release.  It has no problem with
fonts since it relies on fontconfig rather than an idiosyncratic
hard-wired font path.

Allin Cottrell