Re: Make Gnuplot using the mathematical minus sign

[Philipp K. J. <ja...@ie...>]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2015 16:54:01 -0800
Ethan A Merritt <sf...@us...> wrote:

I see - this is very interesting:

Upon gnuplot startup:

	show encoding
        	nominal character encoding is default
	        however LC_CTYPE in current locale is en_US.UTF-8

and tic labels use 'x' chars.

When I explicitly do:

	set encoding utf8

then (as you say) the tic labels use the mult sign.

At the same time, I can use Unicode characters
(beyond ASCII) in strings - which led me to believe
that UTF8 encoding was already active.

I am confused, but will put "set encoding utf8" 
in my .gnuplot file.

Best,

		Ph.



> 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
> > >