[GRASS-user] Icelandic / international characters in databases and ps.map

[Glynn Clements]

John A Stevenson wrote:

> After initially being put off by seeing complicated scripts, I've 
> started to use psmap.  I wanted to use the postscript fill patterns to 
> create a geological map that would reproduce in black and white.  It's 
> really good - the commands are pretty easy and the results look clear 
> and excellent.
> 
> Anyway.  I have digitised some of the main peaks in the region, whose 
> names contain Icelandic characters.  Their names contain Icelandic 
> characters.  Using v.db.select, they appear to have stored correctly.  
> When I use labels created from the vector, the characters appear as gaps 
> with d.labels and as nonsense symbols using ps.map.
> 
> I read on the psmap g.manual page about character encoding, but don't 
> know how it applies to the labels/database.
> 
> Can anyone help?

First, any text passed to ps.map must be in ISO-8859-1; other
encodings won't work (although if your PostScript interpreter has
suitable fonts, you can fix this by manually editing prolog.ps).

If you use FreeType fonts, d.* commands will work with any encoding
known to iconv (from the command line, you need to specify the
encoding via d.font; I don't recall how the GUI deals with this).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>