graphics fonts

Description

Some Graphic entities such as Text, Axes, Label or Legend entities display one or more character strings in graphic figures. The appearance of the displayed strings can be modified by specifying different fonts and character sizes.

Changing font

Fonts used in graphic figures are selected from a set of fonts called loaded fonts. In other words, the loaded fonts are the ones currenlty available in graphic figures. The list of these fonts can be obtained using the xlfont function without argument. By default, Scilab contains a set of 11 loaded fonts. This set can be modified and extended using the xlfont function with a font name as argument. The added font can either be loaded from a file or be one of the system. To know the list of fonts available on the system use the xlfont('AVAILABLE_FONTS') command. For more information on how to manipulate fonts see xlfont.

Here is the list of the 11 default fonts.

Font number	Font Family	Bold	Italic
0	Monospaced	No	No
1	ScilabSymbols	No	No
2	Serif	No	No
3	Serif	No	Yes
4	Serif	Yes	No
5	Serif	Yes	Yes
6	SansSerif	No	No
7	SansSerif	No	Yes
8	SansSerif	Yes	No
9	SansSerif	Yes	Yes
10	SansSerif	Yes	Yes

The font used by a graphic entities can be modified with its font_style property. This is a positive integer referecing one of the loaded fonts. Its value must be between 0, referecing the first font, and the number of loaded fonts minus one, referencing the last font.

The fractional_font controls the font anti-aliasing. Its value can be either 'on' or 'off'. If its value is 'on' the font is smoothed, otherwise it's not.

Changing character size

The text size of a graphic entity is modified using the font_size property. It is a scalar specifying the displayed character size.

The Scilab character size is different from the Java size. Here is the equivalence between the two scales.

Scilab Size	Java Size
0	8
1	10
2	12
3	14
4	18
5	24
6	30
7	36
8	42
9	48
10	54

The character size might not be an integer. In this case, the result depends on the entities fractional_font property. If fractional_font property is 'on' then the displayed font size is interpolated between the two closest integer. For example, a font size of 2.5 displays characters with a Java size of 13. If fractional_font property is 'off' then the displayed font size is truncated to its integer part. For example, a font size of 2.5 displays characters using a Java size of 12.

See Also

• xlfont — load a font in the graphic context or query loaded font
• graphics_entities — description of the graphics entities data structures