Re: Make Gnuplot using the mathematical minus sign

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Tuesday, 27 January, 2015 16:35:02 Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Jan 2015 15:53:13 -0800
> Ethan A Merritt <sf...@us...> wrote:
> 
> > On Tuesday, 27 January, 2015 15:33:15 Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> > > 
> > > [snip]
> > > 
> > > In that spirit (and sorry for hijacking your
> > > posting): I noticed that the %h and %H conversion
> > > specifiers use an 'x' (letter x) and a '*' (asterisk)
> > > to form numbers like 3.1 x 10^4.
> > > 
> > > It would be lovely if they used the "multiplication
> > > sign" (U+00d7) and the dot operator (U+22c5 - or
> > > alternatively U+00b7) instead.
> > 
> > gnuplot does in fact use a multiplication sign (U+00d7)
> > if the encoding permits.  That covers almost all linux
> 
> Well, if I do:
> 	set t wxt font "Times"
> 	plot [:20] exp(x)
> then the ytic labels look very much like an 'x', 
> not like the multiplication sign.

I cannot say what your fonts look like.
I suspect if you look closely you will see a difference
after:

   set encoding utf8; replot
   set encoding iso_8859_1; replot

The relevant source code is in file util.c starting at line 644.

In looking at it now, I see that it would be possible to
pick up several other ISO_8859 encodings as well as UTF8.
I wonder how many systems still default to ISO_8859-{1|2|15}
rather than UTF8.

	Ethan

> Is this a font problem (substituting 'x' if
> no glyph for U+00d7 is available)? But I 
> thought that fontconfig will supply another
> FONT if necessary, but not substitute a
> different CHARACTER.
>
> > systems since the default encoding is UTF-8.  MSWin encoding
> > CP1252 uses the symbol 0xd7, which I think is the same?
> > I'm not sure what the default encoding is on OSX.
> > The LaTeX terminals use \\times or \\cdot.
> > 
> > 	Ethan
> >