Re: gdImageStringFT: Could not find/open font while printing string values of mean with font Helvetica

[Thomas Weber]

Question to the rest of the list:

This is becoming a FAQ. I'm thinking about patching print.m to use a
different font than Helvetica, namely one of the GNU FreeFont
project[2]. This would include exporting GDFONTPATH in print.m or giving
the path to the font in full. While easy in Debian (I can force the font
package to be installed), I don't know how to handle this issue in
Octave itself.

Am Mittwoch, den 30.04.2008, 11:42 -0700 schrieb garfieldpbj:
> Can anybody help me what to do when I get the following error when trying to
> print to a .png file? 
> 
> gdImageStringFT: Could not find/open font while printing string value with
> font Helvetica 
> ? 

1) Get the Helvetica font as truetype font (it's actually unlikely that
you have it, unless you paid for it).

2) Supply a font name that you have. If you want something close to
Helvetiva, Arial is a good choice (comes in the msttcorefonts package).
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-octave-devel/2008-April/003967.html

3) Set the environmental variable GDFONTPATH to the directory where your
truetype font lives, in the above case of Arial:
        export GDFONTPATH=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts 
(from the shell)

> I have searched the internet, but nothing seems to help.. 
> 
> The problem arose after i upgraded to ubuntu 8.04 from 7.10 

Which means in terms of Octave? Ie, which Octave version do you use?
For the record: yes, I know which version is in Ubuntu, I'm one of
Debian's packagers. However, other people on this list[1] don't use
neither Debian nor Ubuntu, so please help them help you by specifiying
your version. Octave comes with a command "bug_report", which will
gather this information for you.

Your issue is one of the interactions between gnuplot and libgd, so
there's not much Octave can do.

[1] Quite likely the majority.
[2] http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/

Regards
        Thomas