gnuplot documentation

188 gnuplot 4.3 77 TERMINAL
The font file is searched in the working directory and in all directories listed in the fontpath which
is determined by set fontpath. In addition, the fontpath can be set using the environment variable
GNUPLOT FONTPATH. If this is not set a system dependent default search list is used. See set
fontpath (p. 100) for more details.
For using the encapsulated font file you have to specify the font name (which normally is not the same
as the file name). When embedding a font file by using the fontfile option in interactive mode, the font
name is printed on the screen. E.g.
Font file ’p052004l.pfb’ contains the font ’URWPalladioL-Bold’. Location:
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/URW/p052004l.pfb
When using pfa or pfb fonts, you can also find it out by looking into the font file. There is a line similar
to "/FontName /URWPalladioL-Bold def". The middle string without the slash is the fontname, here
"URWPalladioL-Bold". For TrueType fonts, this is not so easy since the font name is stored in a binary
format. In addition, they often have spaces in the font names which is not supported by Type 1 fonts
(in which a TrueType is converted on the fly). The font names are changed in order to eliminate the
spaces in the fontnames. The easiest way to find out which font name is generated for use with gnuplot,
start gnuplot in interactive mode and type in "set terminal postscript fontfile ’’".
For converting font files (either ttf or pfb) to pfa format, the conversion tool has to read the font from
a file and write it to standard output. If the output cannot be written to standard output, on-the-fly
conversion is not possible.
For pfb files "pfbtops" is a tool which can do this. If this program is installed on your system the
on the fly conversion should work. Just try to encapsulate a pfb file. If the compiled in program call
does not work correctly you can specify how this program is called by defining the environment variable
GNUPLOT PFBTOPFA e.g. to "pfbtops %s". The %s will be replaced by the font file name and thus
has to exist in the string.
If you don’t want to do the conversion on the fly but get a pfa file of the font you can use the tool
"pfb2pfa" which is written in simple c and should compile with any c compiler. It is available from
many ftp servers, e.g.
ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/ps2mf/
In fact, "pfbtopfa" and "pfb2ps" do the same job. "pfbtopfa" puts the resulting pfa code into a file,
whereas "pfbtops" writes it to standard output.
TrueType fonts are converted into Type 1 pfa format, e.g. by using the tool "ttf2pt1" which is available
from
http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net/
If the builtin conversion does not work, the conversion command can be changed by the environment
variable GNUPLOT TTFTOPFA. For usage with ttf2pt1 it may be set to "ttf2pt1 -a -e -W 0 %s - ".
Here again, %s stands for the file name.
For special purposes you also can use a pipe (if available for your operating system). Therefore you start
the file name definition with the character "