Re: UTF-8 characters and gnuplot module

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

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  This thread is a bit confusing to me, so if there is an actual
>  question to me, someone has to rephrase it (and keep in mind
>  that I have not used gnuplot in 'ages').

Yes, I have two questions (that have been discussed at the begining of
development already).

1.) here's a minimal example:

\enableregime[utf]
\usemodule[gnuplot]
\setupGNUPLOT[terminal=mp] % so that you don't need to use the special binary

\startGNUPLOTscript[sin]
set xlabel 'héllo'
plot sin(x), sin(2*x) t '$sin(2x)$'
\stopGNUPLOTscript

\startGNUPLOTscript[cos]
# this comment doesn't work
set xlabel 'héllo'
plot cos(x)
\stopGNUPLOTscript

\starttext
\useGNUPLOTgraphic[sin]
\useGNUPLOTgraphic[cos]
\stoptext

Now, run texexec filename and take a look at filename-gnuplot-1.plt

The second example needs to be commented out anyway as it fails
completely. The problem is that the content of between GNUPLOTscript
should be copied *verbatim* to .plt file. Now it goes through some
semi-modified TeX parser that usually screws up some non-trivial cases
(or, better said, only trivial cases work OK). If there existed some
\startbuffer[name][continue], then it could be misused to put the
content between GNUPLOTscript literally to that plt file. However, I
have already been asking about how to do that (already in the time
when line endings were screwed up) and there has been no real
conclusion made so far. I guess it is possible, otherwise buffers and
verbatim would not work, but I have no idea how to do that.

Question 1a would probably be how to do that in mkiv, but that's not
such a high priority as fixing the "bug" in the old code.

>
>  Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>  >
>  > set ylabel "h\dochar {233}llo"
>
>  Should this not be
>
>    set ylabel "h\\dochar {233}llo"

It should. But it's not me the one who has put that junk to the .plt
file :) :) :)
ConTeXt does some weird thing with characters and puts "\dochar {233}"
instead of "é" into the .plt file.

(Almost) "the same thing" (printed \dochar) has happened to me a few
times when using verbatim in ConTeXt (but got fixed).

>  because of GNUplot's own double-quoted string parsing?
>  Independent of expansion in \startGNUPLOTscript, I mean?

True, but how are you going to convince TeX (ConTeXt) to put double
backslash there?

>  Speaking as the maintainer of Metapost, assuming 'plain.mp':
>  you should be able to use UTF-8 in btex ... etex under the
>  following (narrow) conditions:
>
>  * you have set up the verbatimtex .. etex properly so that your
>    macro package nows how to handle the UTF-8 input;
>  * your tex engine generates DVI files
>  * the resulting fonts that are used in that DVI are TFM-based.
>
>  For context, that would mean mkii pdftex with \enableregime[utf],
>  but in that case, you are much better off using \textext.

2.) So - how should the (plain) metapost file look like and how should
mptopdf be called, so that utf-8 would work OK in some portable-enough
way?
(\'e works OK there, it was only one backslash missing.)

>  You cannot have UTF-8 in literal metapost label strings, because
>  Metapost only knows about traditional TFM fonts (single byte).

That's fine. I do not need metapost label strings.

Thanks a lot,
   Mojca
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