Gnuplot PDF Terminal Exhibits Font Issues on Mac

Question

Out of the blue, my Gnuplot has started having issues with the pdfcairo terminal. The font in the produced PDF files is jammed as if the width of the individual characters was set to zero. I am using Gnuplot 5.2.7 on Mac OS, installed via homebrew.

Here, a minimal not-working example:

reset
set terminal pdfcairo
set output "mnwe.pdf"
set xlabel "Time t"
set ylabel "sin(t)"
plot [0:2*pi] sin(x) with lines notitle

which produces the following output:

I suspect that the font issue occurred after a recent update to patchlevel 7. Gnuplot 5.2.2 on my Ubuntu machine works as expected and produces the following output for the same Gnuplot script:

Unfortunately, it does not seem to be possible to revert to the previous Gnuplot version with homebrew.

I confirmed that the epscairo and pngcairo terminals work as expected on my Mac with Gnuplot 5.2.7, so the issue is solely with the pdfcairo terminal.
Edit: In fact, the bug does affect the other Cairo-based terminals as well. Don't know what I did wrong when I checked first.

I would appreciate any pointers at how to fix this.

Hereby

There is a similar report on the gnuplot issue tracker that implicates use of pango version 1.44 in the recent homebrew build of gnuplot 5.2.7. sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/bugs/2194 – Agronomy

FYI here is the issue on the pango git: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/422 – Ventail

Thank you @bibi! This is still an issue in gnuplot 5.2.8. – Outer

Answer 1

As of Aug. 24, 2020, the version of Pango on homebrew is 1.46.1 and this bug seems to have been fixed. Doing a clean installation of Gnuplot and Pango via homebrew should solve this problem.

Upholster

Answer 2

For Homebrew, I changed the pango formula to stick to version 1.43

Until it gets fixed, this should solve the problem:

brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies pango
brew install iltommi/brews/pango

This will install this formula: https://github.com/iltommi/homebrew-brews/blob/master/pango.rb in which I replaced the v1.44 to 1.43

Ventail

Excellent. I confirmed that this works as a workaround for now. – Hereby

I have to repeat this process every time another Homebrew formula wants to update pango – Backchat

One-line replacement for brew upgrade: brew uninstall pango && brew upgrade && brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies pango && brew install iltommi/brews/pango – Backchat

Answer 3

Installing newer version Pango 1.45.5 seems to resolves the issue as well, please confirm:

brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies pango
brew install dersimn/craft/pango

Formula: https://github.com/dersimn/homebrew-craft/blob/master/Formula/pango.rb

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