Re: How to set different fonts (question answered)

[Brett Green]

The documentation in < https://octave.org/doc/interpreter/Text-Properties.html > is fairly clear. I think the only possible benefit would be a few possible options as examples. For instance, we have the fontunits entry:

fontunits: "centimeters" | "inches" | "normalized" | "pixels" | {"points"}

fontname's entry is:

fontname: string, def. "*"

What about something like this?

fontname: string, def. "*", other options e.g.  "Helvetica" | "Courier New" | ...

Mostly, the reason I had trouble using this property was that I had trouble finding it. My go-to is the "walk-through" part of the documentation, e.g. here: < https://octave.org/doc/interpreter/Plot-Annotations.html >. Though they are treasure troves of functionality, properties lists like < https://octave.org/doc/interpreter/Text-Properties.html > are less easy to find and to learn from. Perhaps that's only a fault of mine, though.

- Brett Green

On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 10:33 AM Nicholas Jankowski <address@hidden> wrote:

Assuming there might be users after you with similar questions, do you have a suggestion for revised documentation text that would have made this more clear/useful? 

On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 10:20 AM Brett Green <address@hidden> wrote:

I would like to be able to use a LaTeX math mode-like font for some plots. (I'm running Octave 5.1.0 on Windows 10.) The documentation at

https://octave.org/doc/interpreter/Text-Properties.html

suggests using the fontname property for this, but its instructions do not specify

Two suggestions came up when I searched. The first was just to use a font name, like

set(gca,"This Is A Font","defaulttextfontname","Helvetica")

This works, which is great.

The second was to give the directory and file like this:

title("This Is A Font","fontname","C:\Windows\Fonts\cambria.ttc")

While this doesn't return an error, it just prints the title with the default font.

In the end, all I had to do was

title("This Is A Font","fontname","Cambria Math")

and it worked. I had forgotten that I had not tried the simple string ("Cambria Math" here) with the property "fontname" intead of "defaulttextfontname".

I was surprised and impressed that I didn't need to specify a directory for an external font. Kudos to everyone who worked on this, and on Octave in general!

Though I was able to answer my question in the end, I wanted to submit this to the mailing list archives in case it could help someone else in the future.

- Brett Green