The libplot library and applications built on it, such as
graph, plot, tek2plot, and pic2plot, can use
many fonts. These include 22 Hershey vector fonts, 35 Postscript fonts,
45 PCL 5 fonts, and 18 Hewlett--Packard vector fonts. We call
these 120 supported fonts the `built-in' fonts. The Hershey fonts are
constructed from stroked characters digitized c. 1967 by Dr.
Allen V. Hershey at the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center in
Dahlgren, VA. The 35 Postscript fonts are the outline fonts
resident in all modern Postscript printers, and the 45 PCL 5 fonts
are the outline fonts resident in modern Hewlett--Packard LaserJet
printers and plotters. (The old LaserJet III, which was
Hewlett--Packard's first PCL 5 printer, supported only 8 of the
45.) The 18 Hewlett--Packard vector fonts are fonts that are resident
in Hewlett--Packard printers and plotters (mostly the latter).
The Hershey fonts can be used by all types of Plotter supported by
libplot, and the Postscript fonts can be used by X, Illustrator,
Postscript, and Fig Plotters. So, for example, all variants of
graph can use the Hershey fonts, and graph -T X,
graph -T ai, graph -T ps and graph -T fig can use
the Postscript fonts. The PCL 5 fonts can be used by by
Illustrator, PCL, and HP-GL Plotters, and by graph -T ai,
graph -T pcl, and graph -T hpgl. The Hewlett--Packard
vector fonts can be used by by PCL and HP-GL Plotters, and by
graph -T pcl and graph -T hpgl. X Plotters and
graph -T X are not restricted to the built-in Hershey and
Postscript fonts. They can use any X Window System font.
The plotfont utility, which accepts the `-T' option, will
print a character map of any font that is available in the specified
output format. See section The plotfont Utility.
For the purpose of plotting text strings (see section Text string format and escape sequences), the 120 built-in fonts are divided into typefaces. As you can see from the following tables, our convention is that in any typeface with more than a single font, font #1 is the normal font, font #2 is italic or oblique, font #3 is bold, and font #4 is bold italic or bold oblique. Additional variants (if any) are numbered #5 and higher.
The 22 Hershey fonts are divided into typefaces as follows.
Nearly all Hershey fonts except the Symbol fonts use the ISO-Latin-1 encoding, which is a superset of ASCII. The Symbol fonts consist of Greek characters and mathematical symbols, and use the symbol font encoding documented in the Postscript Language Reference Manual. By convention, each Hershey typeface contains a symbol font (HersheySerifSymbol or HersheySansSymbol, as appropriate) as font #0.
HersheyCyrillic, HersheyCyrillic-Oblique, and HersheyEUC (which is a Japanese font) are the only non-Symbol Hershey fonts that do not use the ISO-Latin-1 encoding. For their encodings, see section Cyrillic and Japanese fonts.
The 35 Postscript fonts are divided into typefaces as follows.
All Postscript fonts except the ZapfDingbats and Symbol fonts use the ISO-Latin-1 encoding. The encodings used by the ZapfDingbats and Symbol fonts are documented in the Postscript Language Reference Manual. By convention, each Postscript typeface contains the Symbol font as font #0.
The 45 PCL 5 fonts are divided into typefaces as follows.
All PCL 5 fonts except the Wingdings and Symbol fonts use the ISO-Latin-1 encoding. The encoding used by the Symbol font is the symbol font encoding documented in the Postscript Language Reference Manual. By convention, each PCL typeface contains the Symbol font as font #0.
The 18 Hewlett--Packard vector fonts are divided into typefaces as follows.
The Hewlett--Packard vector fonts with an asterisk (the ANK and Symbol
fonts) are only available when producing HP-GL output for the HP7550A
graphics plotter and the HP758x, HP7595A and HP7596A drafting plotters.
The ANK fonts are Japanese fonts (see section Cyrillic and Japanese fonts), and
the Symbol fonts contain a few miscellaneous mathematical symbols.
To ensure that these fonts are available, you must set the
environment variable or driver parameter HPGL_VERSION to "1.5".
All Hewlett--Packard vector fonts except the ANK and Symbol fonts use
the ISO-Latin-1 encoding. The Arc fonts are proportional
(variable-width) fonts, and the Stick fonts are fixed-width fonts. If
HPGL_VERSION is "1.5" then the Arc fonts will be kerned. But if
HPGL_VERSION is "2" (the default), there will be no kerning.
Apparently Hewlett--Packard dropped support for device-resident kerning
tables when moving from HP-GL to modern HP-GL/2 and PCL 5. For
information about Hewlett--Packard vector fonts and the way in which
they are kerned (in pen plotters, at least), see the article by
L. W. Hennessee et al. in the Nov. 1981 issue of the
Hewlett--Packard Journal.
To what extent do the fonts supported by libplot contain
ligatures? The Postscript fonts, the PCL 5 fonts, and the
Hewlett--Packard vector fonts, at least as implemented in
libplot, do not contain ligatures. However, six of the 22
Hershey fonts contain ligatures. The character combinations "fi", "ff",
"fl", "ffi", and "ffl" are automatically drawn as ligatures in
HersheySerif and HersheySerif-Italic. (Also in the two HersheyCyrillic
fonts and HersheyEUC, since insofar as printable ASCII characters are
concerned, they are identical [or almost identical] to HersheySerif.)
In addition, "tz" and "ch" are ligatures in HersheyGothicGerman.
The German double-s character `@ss{'}, which is called an `eszet',
is not treated as a ligature in any font. To obtain an eszet, you
must either request one with the escape sequence "\ss" (see section Text string format and escape sequences), or, if you have an 8-bit keyboard, type an eszet
explicitly.
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