Re: x11: slow drawing after set xtics font

[Petr M. <mi...@ph...>]

> > > If the drawing gets so slow, it seems that the server searches the font list 
> > > for each tic for font "*", right? Cannot this be eliminated?
> > > 
> > > I think that Octave should produce gnuplot code like:
> > > 
> > > set terminal x11 font "arial"
> > > set title "Hello world" font ",12"
> > > 
> > > instead of
> > > 
> > > set terminal x11
> > > set title "Hello world" font "*,12"
> 
> But I am puzzled why Octave would ever want to pass "*" as a font name.

What I can see on my Linux is that
gnuplot> set title "Hello world" font ",20"; p x
gnuplot> set title "Hello world" font "*,20"; p x

show the same drawing, while in

gnuplot> set title "Hello world" font ",22"; p x
gnuplot> set title "Hello world" font "*,22"; p x
the case ",22" shows an ugly text.


> > The problem the octave developers have is that identifying a font 
> > that reliably works for x11, aqua and windows ... 
> > and hopefully works for the other terminals as well.  
> 
> I am afraid that is impossible.  Neither Octave nor gnuplot has any
> control over what fonts are available on a user's system, and different
> terminal types intrinsically use different types of fonts.

Cannot it get the list via xlsfont, GDFONTPATH, etc. and then use 
arial/verdana/helvetica/ (i.e. the usual ttf and postscript fonts)?

> The right thing to pass is either no font option at all (which on all
> terminals should yield a usable default), or   ",12"   which will 
> yield that same default font in a particular size. 


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PM