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

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

On Thu, 19 Apr 2012, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

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

I guess by "it" you mean the traditional gnuplot postscript 
terminal. Yes, it just passes through any font request given 
by the user, without any check on the availablility of the 
font. It's then up to the PostScript interpreter to find the 
font or substitute a default.

By contrast, the epscairo terminal does check for a specified 
font via fontconfig. If it's found, the font is embedded 
(subsetted); if not, a default font is embedded instead. 
(There's no error message or warning if the specified font is 
not found and the default is used -- maybe there should be?)

You say that the epscairo terminal

> ... creates bitmap images embded inside PostScript which is not
> why one would want to use PostScript in the first place.

Eh? Could you give an example of that? Some EPS files contain 
a bitmapped "preview" but I'm not seeing that with files 
generated by epscairo, and the PS content itself is in pure 
vector form. For example

set term epscairo font "cmr10,12"
set output 'test.eps'
plot sin(x)

Allin Cottrell