Re: gd & fontpath (could not find/open font)

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

On Thu, 19 Apr 2012, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 23:55, Allin Cottrell wrote:
>> On Wed, 18 Apr 2012, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>>> I'm still experiencing a problem with
>>>
>>>> set term png
>>>
>>>   Terminal type set to 'png'
>>>   Could not find/open font when opening font "arial", using internal
>>> non-scalable font
>>
>> Urgh. Why on earth are you using libgd (whose font handling is beyond
>> redemption) rather than the cairo-based PNG terminal?
>
> I'm not. I'm just annoyed by the error and I would like to fix it.
>
> Or - more precisely - macports builds gnuplot with gd2 by default, so
> "set term png" ends up with gd2 instead of cairo. On default gnuplot
> install this would use cairo when available.
>
> Maybe gnuplot on macports should be changed, so that gd2 would not be
> built by default (if that is the preference/recommendation of gnuplot
> developers)?

I don't have the status of a gnuplot developer, but as a gnuplot 
user and occasional patch-submitter I would strongly recommend 
treating libgd as "legacy" and concentrating on the cairo-based 
terminals.

> (Independent of that I would also like to know how font searching
> works in PostScript, but that has a lower priority.)

PostScript is a page description language, and as such it knows 
absolutely nothing about font-searching. It's happy to use any
compatible font that is fed to it by some other piece of software
that does know about font-searching.

The latest gnuplot has an "epscairo" terminal which presumably 
combines fontconfig font-searching (cairo and fontconfig being 
linked) with PostScript generation. This sounds very nice but I 
haven't yet experimented with it much myself.

Allin Cottrell