#299 Arial font italic

[Alexander Stangl]

Hey,

I have troubles selecting the Arial font using gnuplot Version 6.0 patchlevel 2 on Win 11.
set term wxt font "Arial" results in italic, same with pngcairo terminal. This used to work with gnuplot v5 on Win 10. Any suggestions how I can select the font properly?

"Arial-MT" works for wxt terminal, but not for pngcairo.

Thanks,
Alex

[Ethan Merritt]

Try setting environmental variable
PANGOCAIRO_BACKEND=fc

This seems helpful both on Windows and on MacOS

Please see
https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/bugs/2739/
https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/bugs/2746/

[Alexander Stangl]

Thanks a lot for your return! If I add
PANGOCAIRO_BACKEND=fc
into the "gnuplotrc" initialisation file (if that's what you meant), I get the following infinite looping error msg:
WARNING: Error during initialization
Check initialization files and environment variables (e.g. GNUTERM)
"C:\Program Files\gnuplot\share\gnuplotrc" line 48: load/eval nested too deeply

where line 48 corresponds to PANGOCAIRO_BACKEND=fc.

However, I could change to Arial Unicode MS, which works as long as the fontscale in the terminal is below 3. (Which brings me to another topic of how to best scale up the DPI of a png output - but I'll open another ticket for this)

[Ethan Merritt]

No, that's not what I meant. It's not a gnuplot command. It's a change to the operating system environment. The command or system configuration tool needed to set an enviromental variable depends on your operating system and in particular on the shell being used. One my system (linux + csh) it would besetenv PANGOCAIRO_BACKEND fc, in the bash shell it would be export PANGOCAIRO_BACKEND=fc. I don't know what the command is for WIndows. This is something the font utilities look at, not something that gnuplot knows about; gnuplot just assumes that the font utilities have been configured to deliver the requested font.