Re: [ferret_users] Unicode in Ferret

[Ryo Furue <furue@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Marco,

> It still would be a nice feature if Unicode characters could be
> inserted for labels.

I'm not a Ferret developer, but I can see that that would
be a huge change.  Currently Ferret doesn't use the operating
system's font mechanism.  It uses its own font set and
character coding system.

For example, try zooming into a plot generated by Ferret and
you'll realize that an alphabetic letter like "a" is actually
a collection of curved lines.  These collections of lines
representing letters (what we normally call "font")
are included in the Ferret distribution, not taken
from the operating system.

Also, each letter is assigned a number, such as 65 for
letter "A" and 97 for letter "a".  (I'm not sure this
is actually what Ferret uses. This is simply ASCII.)
To include Unicode, you'd have to extend this coding
system.

To accomplish this, you'd have either to extend the internal
font mechanism or to switch to the font system of the OS.

For the moment, the best solution is to use an application,
such as Inkscape and Illustrator, to edit a Ferret-generated
PostScript to include characters not covered by Ferret.

Cheers,
Ryo