[changeset] print.m (matlab compatibility)

[Daniel J Sebald]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 10-Mar-2009, Shai Ayal wrote:
> 
> | On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 6:39 AM, Ben Abbott <bpabbott at mac.com>
> | > Without having a scalable font, I don't know how to reconcile this.
> | >
> | > Would it be possible to include a single ttf, or pfa file with Octave?
> | >
> | 
> | I think we might need to include some ttf/pfa fonts anyway for the
> | opengl-renderer.
> | The main problem is that that there is that there are no canonical
> | fonts in well known locations in linux, so the best thing would
> | probably be to include some with octave.
> 
> So every application that needs some fonts should include them?  That
> seems bad.  Is there no way we can just depend on some font handling
> library and expect it to provide the fonts for us?  And in the current
> case, Octave is not even using the fonts directly, so it seems that
> gnuplot is the thing that should be dealing with this (though I
> understand that we will need to deal with it directly in Octave at
> some point).  So is it really our problem, or is it a packaging
> problem that should be handled by whoever is building Octave (and
> gnuplot) packages?

Fonts have always been a headache, except for perhaps Apple, the history of which actually comes more from NeXT, I think.

I was going to suggest as part of the release to include a "recommended packages" sort of thing that instructs Debian/SUSE/Fedora/RedHat/etc. builders how to write package dependencies for gnuplot/octave.

Does Matlab unix have Helvetica?  Or is that a Windows-only sort of thing because of font-name copyright?

Dan