Re: x11: slow drawing after set xtics font

[Ben A. <bpa...@ma...>]

On Jun 19, 2009, at 2:50 AM, Petr Mikulik wrote:

>>>> 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)?
>

I like that idea (provided xlsfonts always accompanies x11).

If we wanted to match a scalable font whose metrics are as close to  
Helvetica as possible, how would that be done with xlsfonts?

Ben