Displaying font for a gnuplot terminal

Question

In qt terminal, show term says:

terminal type is qt 0 font "Sans,9"

but cairo terminals never mention anything about fonts:

terminal type is pdfcairo transparent enhanced fontscale 0.5 size 5.00in, 3.00in

Manual does not really help by refering to the freedesktop website which provides zero useful information to solve the problem. So how do I find what font is gnuplot (or its associates) trying to use (and failing miserably) on OSX.

My goal is to figure out what happened on my system. After plotting with instructions that said to use Helvetica, I keep getting plots with damaged text such as this:

This only happens with cairo type terminals and only since I tried to plot with Helvetica settings, which is probably not on my system. I tried regenerating font cach on OSX by fc-cache -fv with no help.

Answer 1

This is likely the known OSX pango/cairo bug (version 1.44 is bad, version 1.43 is good). The reported solution is to downgrade the pango library.

• gnuplot Issue #2197
• pango/harfbuzz font issues
• previous stackoverflow question