Error messages from "set term png font ..."

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

On Monday 13 April 2009 14:20:19 Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> 
> May I suggest at least something not-so-related? The message
>    Could not find/open font when opening font "arial", using internal
> non-scalable font
> is a bit annoying, pops up everywhere (at the moment) and doesn't tell
> anything useful to the user. I suggest rewriting the message and
> stating that one could try to set GDFONTPATH manually. (It took me a
> while to figure that out.)

We could print an additional message if you like.
Would that be preferable, or would it be even more annoying?
Maybe:

  Could not find/open font when opening font "arial", 
  using internal non-scalable font.
  See  GDFONTPATH discussion in "help set term png" 

> (Just saying that "arial" could not be found is far from helpful and
> it's particularly annoying for newbie users since it pops up every
> time "by default" ... well, at least annoying enough that I was ready
> to learn some gd basics :) :)

That part of the message is generated by libgd itself, not by gnuplot.
We just pass it on to the user by saying something like
   if (error) fprintf(stderr, "%s", error)

> PS: I agree with the one who mentioned it that there also needs to be
> a way to request the default (build-in) font even if arial starts
> working out-of-the-box.

Why?  (just curious)

-- 
Ethan A Merritt