Re: \ell in postscript enhanced

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 27 October 2004 06:41 am, Giu...@ct... wrote:
> 
> I would like to use a calligraphic lower-case l (LaTeX: \ell) in a label 
> using gnuplot (set terminal postscript enhanced).
> 
> It seems not listed among the available characters within the Symbol font.

Correct.
 
> What other relatively "standard" postscript font would you recommend me to 
> use, hopefully containing also other relevant math characters?

The only fonts promised [sort of] by the Adobe PostScript spec are
Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol.  You are of course free to specify
any font you like, but you cannot count on it being present in the device you
are printing to, so you must embed it in your PostScript file.

If TeX is installed on your system then you probably have at least some
subset of the Computer Modern fonts used by TeX.  Probably they are in
/usr/share/texmf/fonts/type1/
or
/usr/local/share/texmf/fonts/type1/

All of these are usable by gnuplot, with the caveat that the character
encodings for the Computer Modern fonts are idiosynchratic in the extreme.
You should probably test the font using the demo script  ..../demo/charset.dem
which can help you figure out which character codes correspond to which
glyphs.  So for example:
	set terminal postscript enhanced  "texsya" \
	fontfile /usr/share/texmf/fonts/type1/public/txfonts/txbsya.pfb
	set output 'texsya.ps'
	load 'charset.dem'

Having said all that, I have to point out that so far as I know \ell is not
defined here; it must be a special from one of the add-on LaTeX packages.

I believe the font you want is (on my machine anyhow)
	/usr/share/texmf/fonts/afm/yandy/mathtime/rmtmi.afm
But you would have to convert this from an *.afm file to a *.pfa or *.pfb
file in order for gnuplot to import it.

	hope that helps

-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195