Re: [Plplot-devel] How do you specify special symbols and Greek letters with TrueType fonts?

[Rafael L. <rla...@us...>]

* Alan W. Irwin <ir...@be...> [2004-05-17 22:14]:

> The real ordering problem is for symbols.  We just have an embarrassment of
> riches for freely accessible type 1 postscript fonts and truetype fonts, and
> I expect the symbols for the various fonts don't come in any standard order.
> We likely will just have to live with that situation, and use some variant
> of x07c.c to find out what position corresponds to what symbol for a given
> font. Currently my variant of x07c.c uses "#g\xNN" (where NN is hexadecimal)
> syntax to explore the first 156 symbols of any font.  Once the current 156
> limit is overcome the #g method will only work up to the first 256 symbols
> in the font. Thus, eventually, I want to make sure the "#(NNNN)" method
> (where NNNN is decimal) will work as well.  Currently the "#(NNNN)" method
> of producing symbols corresponding to arbitrary positions in the font table
> only works for Hershey fonts.

Let us try to not reinvent the wheel.  The way to go here is to use Unicode
UTF-8 (see http://www.unicode.org) for the encoding of the characters.  So,
we should make the API accept also Unicode strings as an alternative to the
#-escaped strings.  UTF-8 strings are easily detectable (use for instance
libunicode, available everywhere) and the Freetype library is Unicode-aware.

I am sure that almost all characters of the Hershey fonts have UTF-8
corresponding glyph numbers (see the glyph tables at
http://www.unicode.org/charts/).

-- 
Rafael