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

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 01:23, Allin Cottrell <cot...@wf...> wrote:
> 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.

... but I'm still curious how exactly the fonts are searched, more
precisely, if there is any way to convince gd2 to search recursively.

> 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.

Thank you. I guess that others are sharing the same view?

> PostScript is a page description language, and as such it knows absolutely
> nothing about font-searching.

Oh, thanks for clarifying. I see now that it only writes the font name
into file, no matter whether that font exists anywhere. It doesn't try
to do any embedding of fonts. I thought that PostScript terminal would
also embed fonts, but I was apparently wrong.

> The latest gnuplot has an "epscairo" terminal which presumably combines
> fontconfig font-searching (cairo and fontconfig being linked) with
> PostScript generation.

... and creates bitmap images embded inside PostScript which is not
why one would want to use PostScript in the first place. (Most
probably the image is composed out of multiple smaller bitmap images
since I see some ugly artifacts all over the place.)

Mojca