Re: [Plplot-general] Script & Symbol Fonts?

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2013-03-11 14:35-0600 James Tappin wrote:

> I have an application (Graffer: https://github.com/jtappin/graffer.git)
> that uses plplot as its plotting engine, but when I try to use the script
> or symbol fonts (plsfont(PL_FCI_SCRIPT,...) or plsfont(PL_FCI_SYMBOL,...) I
> just get the regular Sans-serif font.
>
> Is this because I don't have the needed fonts installed, or because the
> various cairo (and epsqt) drivers don't support them?

The latter. Our qt and cairo devices just support serif, sanserif, and
typewriter font families.  Search for fontFamily in
bindings/qt_gui/plqt.cpp or familyLookup in drivers/cairo.c.

The reason for this deliberate design choice for our two best device
driver families (qt and cairo) is that we only want PLplot users to be
able to constrain fonts in the most general way and let glyph-finding
software (such as fontconfig) do its job to find the best glyph for
the (generic) font that is specified.  "Best", of course, depends on
individual choice, but the idea is that if you really want to be
specific about fonts, then do the appropriate fontconfig configuration
(or equivalent Qt4 font configuration) to deliver what you think is
the "best" choice. I admit I have never actually done that because I
have always been satisfied with the default fontcontig or Qt4 font choice.

Also note that "script" and "symbol" fonts are a dated concept.
For example, fontconfig would not know what to do with such font
families since very few if any of the major font designs (all of which
have serif, sanserif, and typewriter families) have script or symbol
families.

I hope this overview of what is going on with font choice and PLplot
is a help to you.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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