Re: Greek letters in the SVG terminal

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

On Monday 14 September 2009 10:47:05 James R. Van Zandt wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to use the svg terminal in a recent version of gnuplot:
> 
>         G N U P L O T
>         Version 4.3 patchlevel 0
>         last modified March 2009
> 
> I can generate a sample file like this:
> 
>   set term svg enhanced
>   set out "sine.svg"
>   set label "e^{i{/Symbol p}}=-1" at graph .5,.5
>   plot sin(x)
>   set out
> 
> When I display the output using inkscape 0.46, I see three problems:
> 
>  - All the lines are missing
>  - The superscripted characters are spaced out
>  - The Greek letter pi appears as "p".
> 
> By googling I came up with workarounds for the first two problems:
> 
>   perl -p -i -e 's/color:([^;]*); *stroke:[^;]*;/color:$1; stroke:$1;/' sine.svg
>   perl -p -i -e 's/xml:space=.preserve.//' sine.svg
> 
> Does anyone have suggestions about the Greek letters?

(1) Fonts
SVG is an XML variant, which means it natively uses UTF-8 encoding.
The "Symbol" font is an Adobe-specific encoding that nobody else uses.
So it works for PostScript and PDF, but probably nothing else.
Use UTF-8

(2) Spacing
Inkscape is broken.  
But hey, so are all the other SVG viewers I know of.

(3) General problems
We worked with the Sodipodi developers to fix a bunch of problems, 
but when Sodipodi was forked to Inkscape they seem
to have forked it from an unfixed version.

On a similar note, in KDE3 the ksvg viewer was probably the best of
a bad lot.  But KDE4 switched to something else that doesn't work at all well.

I've given up on SVG.

I suggest to use the canvas terminal instead.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742