Re: Summary of state of utf-8 supported terminals

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

On 07/03/2015 12:42 AM, sfeam wrote:
> 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.

Ah, that explains PostScript.


> 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

OK.  I've had problems with x11 terminal window crashing (i.e., 
disappearing) with the utf8.dem and enhanced_utf8.dem demos but I can't 
reproduce this consistently.


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

This one I'm having trouble with, primarily.  I'm surprised it's not 
working.


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

No problems here.


> 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?

JPEG works...

I think I will just treat all working under utf8, except PostScript and 
try to resolve the libgd issue separately.

Note, I think there is an invalid ASCII character in the utf8.dem demo. 
  When I tried compiling the latex output, the program complained about 
an unfound character.  I looked at the output in gvim and saw

...z{|}~}}

the third last character which appears as ^? in gvim but may be another 
glyph in your mail viewer.  That line in the demo is labeled 0061 - 
007E, but 7E is 126 and octal \177 is 127.  ASCII 127 is the [DEL], 
which I'm guessing is not assigned a glyph.  I suggest removing \177 
from utf8.dem.

Thanks,

Dan