Re: pngcairo performance on Windows

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> This seems directly relevant, if not very hopeful:
>
>   http://old.nabble.com/Font-Quality-Windows-Vista64-td21729133.html

Actually quite hopeful!  I have made a build of gnuplot for win32
in which I take Behdad Esfahbod's hint (in his message of 3
January); that is, I use pango_cairo_font_map_new_for_font_type
to force use of the pangocairo-fc backend ("fc" = FreeType plus
fontconfig) rather than the pangocairo-win32 one.

This will work only if the Windows system has pango built with
support for FreeType and fontconfig, and those libraries are
available.  But that should be the default, when using the win32
DLLs from http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html . (And failing
this, gnuplot should fall back to using the win32 font backend.)

I have generated new test PNGs (on MS Vista) that have no problem
with missing extremities of fonts:

http://www.wfu.edu/~cottrell/gptest/test8-fc.png
http://www.wfu.edu/~cottrell/gptest/test9-fc.png

And in this build I undid the reversion of Ethan's small change to
the code in gp_cairo.c, in relation to "vert_just" (i.e. changed
that back to the way it is in CVS).

I'll clean up my patch to gp_cairo.c and send it in shortly.

Allin Cottrell