Unicode Support in Julia 1.0

[danmrc]

Hi there,

I am using Julia in Atom in a Mac High Sierra. When I try to plot using a label with a unicode character - like ã or ç - and save it as a png file, the characters become boxes. It works fine when I see the graphic in atom or when I save it in .svg, it just doesn't work when I save as a .png.

I am using the Plots package, and when I change to the PyPlots backend, the problem goes away, so it seems to be a problem with GR.

Thanks in advance.

[jheinen]

Do you have a MWE? I can't reproduce this behaviour?

[danmrc]

I tried the exactly same thing you did.

using Plots

gr()

aa = randn(1000)
plot(aa, label = "Olá mundo")

savefig("test.png")

This is the result:

I was unable to reproduce this on a Windows, though. This just happens on a Mac

[jheinen]

Hmm!?


Really really strange.

[jheinen]

What is your run-time version?

using GR
version()

[Nosferican]

On my Mac, I get some unicode such as accents to display properly, but β for example will appear as ?. If I play around it breaks for other cases such as β₀ which shows as ?â.

[jheinen]

Right now, GR only supports the Latin-1 Supplement (Unicode block). Full UTF-8 support is planned in a future release.

[Nosferican]

Any update on supporting UTF-8?

[jheinen]

Sorry, we didn't have time yet- It's an extensive patch.

[Nosferican]

Is that planned for v0.38.0?

[jheinen]

I can probably provide an "intermediate" solution and "pass" all strings (without conversion) to the output drivers (controlled by a configuration setting). But, this would not work for some output type, e.g. PostScript.

[Nosferican]

... Depending on the quality/supported output types I think it might be worthwhile. I think we mostly use it in the context of HTML/Jupyter/PDF things like μ₀ if that works it would be great win in the meantime.

[ederag]

Same issue under linux (openSUSE Leap-15)

using Plots
gr()
plot(1:10; xlabel="ε")

the ε appears as ? in the plot window.

using GR
version()
"0.39.0"

[jheinen]

The default int Plots is still Latin-1, but you can change it:

ENV["GKS_ENCODING"]="utf-8"
using Plots
gr()
plot(1:10; xlabel="ε")

[ederag]

Indeed, thanks !
Adding ENV["GKS_ENCODING"]="utf-8" to ~/.julia/config/startup.jl works fine too.
Should the default be changed in Plots.jl or is it too early ?