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

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 01:00, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> 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?

My opinion doesn't count too much, but I would prefer seing any
pointer that would help me sort the issue. The one you suggest is OK
or there could also be "help term png font" or some other
straightformard pointer.

The original message is annoying enough by itself. If I (would) know
how to get rid of it, that's definitely less annoying at the end. So
better more info than less noise.

>> 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)

There might be different reasons:
- One may prefer to have no font antialiasing. I don't know the exact
reason why, but antialiased fonts don't work too well in console for
example. For some special type of usage it might make sense. (Btw: Is
there any way to enable antialiasing of lines in png terminal? I see
that pngcairo does it by default.)
- One might have a big collection of plots and wants to add a few new
ones while preserving the original appearance.

I agree that enabling arial or any truetype font by default is better
than enabling the pixel font, but since it doesn't cost too much
effort to preserve the ability to use the default one, I would vote
for some option that would enable one to "go back".

Mojca