font problem with PostScript print

[Larry Doolittle]

Hi -

I'm gradually getting used to octave-3.0, after years with 2.x.
Some things are better, some are "worse", but the compatibility
with colleagues who use Matlab is obviously good.

I had horrible problems today getting usable PostScript plots
out of it.  The default font for xlabel, ylabel, and title appears
to be "helvetica", which does not exist on my system.  I have
"Helvetica", which is still used for labeling tick marks.
The unknown font either causes a crash in converting to pdf, or
some default typewriter font getting used as a fallback.

The origin of the problem appears to be the get_fontname_and_size
routine inside __go_draw_axes__.m.  It says
  if (isempty (t.fontname))
    fnt = "helvetica";
  else
    fnt = tolower (t.fontname);
  endif
I can confirm that a lowercase helvetica ends up on the gnuplot
command pipe, and that attempting to override the default
(title('Testing','fontname','Helvetica')) doesn't work because
of the tolower() call.  In fact, some other part of the program
sets a default "Helvetica", so the isempty() case above is not
normally used.

I don't know if this problem originates with the Octave source, or
the Debian packaging.  I'm running Debian Sid (unstable) on amd64.
  octave-3.0.0-7
  gnuplot-4.2.2-1
Maybe people running Octave on Windows don't see this issue because
of case-insensitive file name matching?

Can anyone reproduce this effect?

    - Larry