Re: UTF-8 characters and gnuplot module

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 7:52 PM, Ethan Merritt <merritt@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Monday 24 March 2008 08:53, Mojca Miklavec wrote:


>  > PS: I'm CC-ing to Ethan in case he has some proposal about what could
>  > be done with metapost terminal to support UTF-8 (one of the best thing
>  > to do would be to remove cmr, but more is needed), and I'm CC-ing to
>  > the developer of the new TikZ terminal (for no specific reason).
>
>  Gnuplot's metapost terminal correctly passes through UTF-8 characters
>  to the output.

That's right.

>  Metapost itself then mangles them.

That's also right. Actually, "btex label etex" which calls TeX (in an
extremely inefficient way, among other things) is the one that doesn't
know how to handle them. It would be nice if someone from this mailing
list had at least some idea if that is solvable or not.

Maybe harcoding utf-8 it into mptopdf could help, but that's far from
being a nice solution, and has other undesired side-effects, so it's
probably not really desired.

Yet another solution would be to add some more commands to verbatimtex
... etex, but I don't see how to do that in some portable way. For
example, metapost terminal already tries to be clever in some cases,
and then loads obsolete (not to say
not-existing-any-more-on-my-computer) fonts.

>  If there is some
>  additional keyword or command that gnuplot could emit that would allow
>  metapost to do better, please let me know.

OK, I will let you know if someone will come up with some idea.

>  Otherwise I think this
>  problem must be resolved by using a different toolchain, one that is
>  UTF-8 aware.
>
>  Mojca:
>
>   If the context terminal allows UTF-8 strings to be properly handled
>  by TeX, for me that's a strong argument in favor of including it in the
>  next gnuplot release.  Does it?

Of course. "Anything" that ConTeXt suports can be supported in those
labels now, including UTF-8. UTF-8 was one of the main reasons why
PostScript terminal was almost out of question for me.
Two years ago Hans and Taco "could not sleep" because of my requests &
complaints, and they have made some major (great) improvements in
ConTeXt and metapost code: labels processing became more reliable and
about 100 times faster, and will improve even more with TeX Live 2008
and mplib.

Those improvements are also the main reason why terminal didn't work
in teTeX (but should work without problems in TeX Live 2007, which
should become part of most Linux distributions by now).


If you are willing to consider inclusion of the context terminal - may
I ask you for your opinion about this terminal as well:
     http://peter.affenbande.org/gnuplot/

We're having some conversation with Peter about the possibilities to
make his Lua-based TikZ terminal portable across plain
TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt formats, while TikZ itself is portable across
dvips/pdfTeX (LuaTeX)/XeTeX engines. His terminal is much more popular
than mine (there are more LaTeX users around than there are ConTeXt
users), but the terminal has a dependency on Lua.

However, any further conversation about this should better be moved
off-list or to gnuplot-beta.

Thanks a lot,
     Mojca
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