Re: buggy rotation of non-scalable font

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

On Tuesday, April 12, 2011 01:28:26 am pl...@pi... wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just tried outputting to png terminal and it failed to find a scalable
> font. I have not found out why yet, but I don't recall this error last
> time I did this a few months back.

Sounds like a problem with libgd.  
Check your environmental variable GDFONTPATH.

> gnuplot> load "foo.gnu
> Could not find/open font when opening font "arial", using internal
> non-scalable font
> 
> 
> However, the result of this is text misplacement.
> 
> set xtics out nomirror  rotate by -45
> 
> Now it seems that 45-rotation is not possible with whatever font it
> substituted but what it did output was the tick label going straight
> upwards from the origin (close to the tick mark) where the rotated text
> would have started.
> 
> There seem to be two problems here.
> 
> 1/ rotate -45 should slope down to the right. Here it IS rotated but +90
> , no rotation or -90 would be a better fall-back.
> 
> 2/ if it does rotate up the origin is totally wrong (ie not recalculated
> for the actual rotation) and dumps all over the plot area.
> 
> 
> My guess from the behaviour is that the actual rotation is a bug rather
> than a fall-back , or at least a buggy fall-back.

The fonts internal to libgd are non-rotatable, although the orientation of
the pixel array can be transposed to give +/- 90 degree orientation.
Given that rotatable fonts (ttf, otf, pfa, etc) are ubiquitous these days,
I don't think it's worth much effort trying to figure out which emergency
fallback orientation of a non-rotatable font is least wrong. 

> This was running std release version 4.2.2

If that's not a typo for 4.4.2, you're talking about a ~5 year old version.
No further releases in the 4.2 series are likely to happen, 
so bug reports should be made against 4.4 or 4.5.

	Ethan


> 
> regards. Peter.
> 
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-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center,  K-428 Health Sciences Bldg
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742