Better fonts in postscript output from KAPPA

Until now, the fonts available for the annotation of axes within KAPPA, etc, were very limited (basically those supplied by PGPLOT). As of 6th February, anyone using a Starlink installation that has been rsynced from Hilo or built from a git checkout will have access to several higher quality postscript fonts when producing postscript output.

The environment variable PGPLOT_PS_FONT can be set to one of the following four values:

1. "Times"
2. "Helvetica"
3. "Courier"
4. "NewCentury"
5. "Zapf"

to produce axis annotations in the corresponding font family. In addition, the usualt PGPLOT font number can be set to control whether the font is italic and/or bold., using the following font numbers:

• "font=1": Normal
• "font=2": Italic
• "font=3": Bold
• "font=4": Bold and Italic

For example, here is a postscript image created using the default PGPLOT font with the following command:

% display $KAPPA_DIR/m31 mode=perc \

        percentiles=\[2,98\] style=^sty

If you first define the PGPLOT_PS_FONT environment variable to "Times" you get the following:

% setenv PGPLOT_PS_FONT Times

% display $KAPPA_DIR/m31 mode=perc \

        percentiles=\[2,98\] style=^sty

In the above command the text file sty  contains

# Set the default line width and colour for all graphical elements.

width=3

colour=black

#  Override the above defaults for specific graphical elements.

colour(border)=green

colour(ticks)=green

width(border)=3

width(ticks)=3

If, in addition, the Font attribute is set to 4 (bold and italic), you get the following:

% display $KAPPA_DIR/m31 mode=perc \

        percentiles=\[2,98\] style="'^sty,font=4'"

And dont forget, you no longer need to use psmerge to combine postscript plots! See this previous blog post.