Re: [Plplot-general] Another way to change the plotting font

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

On 2017-10-19 08:33+0100 p.d...@gm... wrote:

>
>
> Sent from my Windows 10 phone
>
> From: Alan W. Irwin
> Sent: 19 October 2017 03:01
> To: Frédéric
> Cc: plp...@li...
>
>> what do you mean by "set up fontconf"? isn't fontconfig just for
>> POSIX?
>
> No.  For example, the Windows version of GTK+ depends on fontconfig.
>
>
> We have had this discussion before. It is practically impossible for a mere mortal to build the gtk stack on Windows. I have tried and failed more than once. Gimp uses it, so it must be possible, but I have no idea how. Maybe using mingw?

For your information, there is at least two well-known native Windows
binary downloads for fontconfig, and also a variant
of fontconfig that works on Windows with the aid of the cygwin dll.

1. The GTK+ developers themselves produce a binary version of the
fontconfig package as part of their set of GTK+ packages for Windows.
That used to be the best source of binary packages for all GTK+
components, but I feel it has been superseded now by the next choice.

2. The MinGW-w64/MSYS2 distribution provides a binary package for
fontconfig.  Also, apparently anybody that has installed
MinGW-w64/MSYS2 can rebuild any of its packages (presumably including
fontconfig and the rest of the GTK+ stack) from source as well with no
muss/no fuss.  So my conclusion is that MinGW-w64/MSYS is Windows
users' best source of free software libraries right now, and I suggest
you would want to look into that possibility further rather than
attempting the difficult task of trying to build complex sets of free
software libraries such as GTK+ yourself from scratch.

3. Cygwin also provides binary packages for fontconfig, the rest of
the GTK+ stack, and many other free software libraries, but all those
free software libraries depend on the cygwin dll in order to work on
Windows so I am not as keen on the Cygwin distribution of free
software as I am on MinGW-w64/MSYS distribution of free software.

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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