Re: Summary of state of utf-8 supported terminals

[sfeam <sf...@us...>]

On Friday, 03 July 2015 12:03:18 AM Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> Ethan,
> 
> Could you give a brief summary of the support of utf-8 symbols in the 
> terminals?  {/Symbol xyz} wasn't working for me in Qt (probably missing 
> the symbol font, as others reported the symbols appeared in Qt plots). 
> So I tried utf-8 as described in the documentation and that works nicely 
> for Qt terminal.  It seems to me that WXT and Qt work well with utf-8 
> symbols, while the rest of the terminals (x11, png, postscript) have a 
> better chance of working correctly with {/Symbol xyz} format.  Does that 
> sound about right?

The Adobe Symbol font was designed for PostScript.
Using it for anything else is probably not optimal.

PostScript (the language) predates UTF-8 and basically cannot sanely
handle any character set larger that 255.  Use PDF instead.

X11 handles UTF-8 just fine, but it is a little bit complicated to
select the fonts properly.  This is described in the docs.
For an example, see the comments at the top of utf8.dem

Both libgd and cairo use utf-8 with no problem so you shouldn't have
any trouble with png.

SVG is natively UTF-8.  If anything the difficultly would be
creating an svg file using some other encoding.

The latex terminals will pass through text without interpretation,
so on the gnuplot end the encoding shouldn't matter.  But it is
still rare to have a LaTeX configuration that handles the full
range of UTF-8 characters.  

Did I miss a terminal you were interested in?

	Ethan