Re: Chinese text in plots

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

On Mon, 19 Jul 2010, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> >
> > I'm trying to help someone who wants to get traditional Chinese
> > characters into plots. This works fine for the gnuplot terminals
> > that natively support UTF-8 (e.g. the pango/cairo based ones), but
> > is not so easy with EPS and EMF.
> >
> > Does anyone have any experience with this and have any pointers to
> > share?  Thanks.
>
> Definitely not possible in the current EMF terminal; it would have to
> be re-written to use wide characters...

One more thought on this. My understanding is that the MS
wide-character function ExtTextOutW is for use with UTF-16
(only?). But what if you encoded Chinese strings in a plot file as
CP950? I notice that the symbol CHINESEBIG5_CHARSET (=136) seems
to be defined in connection with EMF files. Gnuplot could support
that quite easily, in the minimal sense of offering a "cp950"
encoding option and, in case that is in force, setting the charset
byte in EMF output to CHINESEBIG5_CHARSET. I gather that unlike
UTF-16, text in CP950 doesn't contain any embedded NULs so maybe
it could be handled by ExtTextOutA?

Under what conditions (if any) EMF files created in this way would
display correctly, I'm not sure, but it might be worth a go.

Allin Cottrell