Re: [Matplotlib-users] How to mix maths & text in labels ?

[William H. <wh...@gm...>]

Hi Chris

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 12:28 -0400, Darren Dale wrote:
> > One thing you need to bear in mind if you are using TeX to
> > generate PS output is that the resultant files will probably be
> > unacceptable to many scientific journals without further processing. The
> > production staff generally try to open the PS files in Adobe Illustrator
> > and this causes multiple problems with files generated both by PyX and
> > by dvips. 
> 
> Why is this?
> 

The main problem was the fonts. The first thing they do as a matter of
policy is to open the file in Adobe Illustrator. This requires that the
full font be present in the file apparently (I only have this second
hand) because Illustrator allows you to edit the text of the labels. A
little bit like running a PS file through pstoedit and then editing it
with xfig I guess - that doesn't work with TeX fonts either.

Here is the thread from when I raised the issue with the helpful folk on
comp.text.tex

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/browse_frm/thread/d19575460c561d6b/d447807bb7813dba

There may be a solution that does not involve converting all fonts to
paths but that was the easiest way out since I was under time-pressure
and dealing with production staff who seemed to be working from a very
limited script :) 

> > The solution is to convert all fonts to outlines before 
> > submission (and also make sure all bbox coords are +ve). You can do this
> > with recent versions of ghostscript:
> >
> >  gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -q -sDEVICE=epswrite -dEPSFitPage \
> >     -sOutputFile=new.eps old.eps
> 
> Coincidentally, I was just addressing the use of gs's epswrite this morning on 
> the matplotlib-devel list. Unfortunately, epswrite will yield a file that 
> does not render well on screen. Given the increasing popularity of online 
> publication, it seems this approach for generating eps files would not be 
> acceptable to scientific journals either.
> 

I think it looks fine so long as you turn on the "Smooth line art"
option in your PDF viewer. Unfortunately, this is not on by default in
acroread, presumably because it increases rendering times. 

If someone can come up with a foolproof way to make figures containing
TeX fonts that are acceptable to scientific journals, I, for one, would
be very grateful.
 

> > 1. Good, flexible support for reading data from files
> 
> Could you give an example? In my experience, datafiles tend to get so 
> complicated that all of Matlabs tools were useless. I end up writing code 
> specific to every type that isnt as simple as a few comment lines that are 
> ignored followed by a delimited array of data
> 

Yes, I wasn't thinking of specialized data formats. Python already has
fine support for reading, e.g., FITS files. I was thinking more along
the lines of gnuplot's support for simple ascii data tables. E.g., easy
selection of columns to plot, single blank line indicating a gap in the
plot, double blank line indicating a new dataset, etc. This is all
trivial stuff that I can easily write myself but it would be nice if it
were a part of the plotting package (PyX does this well). It's not
really a sticking point though. 

Cheers

Will