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

[Andrew R. <aro...@ya...>]

At 07:25 PM 18/05/2004 +0200, you wrote:
>In practical terms, we will have to make the functions pllab, plmtex, and
>plptex become Unicode-aware. (N.B. : the remaining problem is with plsym,
>which retains the semantics of the Hershey encoding.) This should not be
>very complicated.  For instance, the following call in x03c.c:
>     plmtex("t", 2.0, 0.5, 0.5, "#frPLplot Example 3 - r(#gh)=3Dsin 5#gh");
>
>would become:
>
>     plmtex("t", 2.0, 0.5, 0.5, "#frPLplot Example 3 - r(=CE=B8)=3Dsin=
 5=CE=B8");

Flying completely off the top of my head here, but assuming we make those=20
functions unicode aware, there should be no need to add anything in the=20
metafile format - as long as the metafile was being replayed to  unicode=20
aware plrender, all should be well. A non unicode plrender would just put a=
=20
funny character out instead, which would at least not be fatal.


>where the funny sequence of 8-bit characters "=CE=B8" means "the lower-case
>greek letter theta".  (Just cut & paste the line above, put it into a file
>and open the file in a Web browser with character coding set to Unicode and
>you will see a nice "theta"; at least, it works with my Mozilla 1.6.)

I gotta say, that is very cool trick (and works with IE too); but I think=20
that using the "#g" syntax is easier on the brain. I know which I would be=
=20
using ;-).

>To prove that it is really simple to use Unicode nowadays, I prepared a C
>program using libunicode that decodes the string above.  It is attached
>below along with its Makefile.  If you have the libunicode-dev package
>installed (in Debian, at least), just type make and you will see:

That is elegance and simplicity !

Can you think of any other issues that might get in the way of adding=20
unicode support ? I think the biggest hurdle would be getting a=20
Hershey/unicode translation table.

-Andrew