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

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

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 22:46 -0400, Darren Dale wrote:
> Since I also have limited time, I could use epswrite for now. The resulting 
> figures are not fantastic on screen, (I already had smooth line art enabled 
> in Adobe Reader), but marginal improvements can be had by increasing the 
> viewer's resolution. The print version is still good. Since epswrite 
> basically converts the fonts to an image anyway, I would like to propose one 
> last time that if text.usetex is true, we draw the text as an image in eps, 
> just until the better solution becomes available. That way the screen version 
> would still look good, the entire picture would open in Adobe illustrator, 
> how big would the files be?
> 

I think this is a good idea, at least to have as an available option. If
you convert the text into an anti-aliased grayscale (or color) image,
then you could probably get away with 150 ppi and the images would not
be large at all (I assume you use something like Flate or RLE
compression). After all, the fraction of the page covered by text will
be small in most instances. It may actually reduce the file size since
you wouldn't need all the font headers.

The only problem I see is that I'm not sure how well PS supports
transparent images - so I can envisage situations in which the text box
might occlude other parts of the graph.

> I am going to add an option to use LaTeX instead of TeX to render the text. 
> TeX is about 30% faster than LaTeX, but ever since John pointed out how much 
> the bitstream fonts suck, I cant help but notice how much the bitstream fonts 
> suck. Right now I am using the pslatex package, and these fonts are quite an 
> improvement. The txfonts package is also nice. How do people feel about two 
> more rc options: one to select tex or latex, and another to choose the font 
> package?
> 

Yes please! I would strongly prefer LaTeX over TeX. Also, I think you
really want a mechanism for the user to specify preamble commands
(loading optional packages, defining macros, etc). This would obviate
the need for a special command to choose the fonts. 

As an aside, I think mathptmx is better than txfonts if you want a Times
Roman math font. The problem with txfonts is that the kernings are
terrible, particularly for superscripts on brackets and the like. On the
other hand, txfonts does have the "varg" option, which replaces the
pointy-bottomed "v", "y" and "g" with round-bottomed versions. The
pointy bottomed "v" is almost indistinguishable from a "nu", which is
rather unfortunate in a formula for the Doppler shift like  $\delta v /
c = \delta \nu / \nu$ :)

One final point. I don't understand why you are including ps2epsi in
your toolchain. I thought that the "i" in "epsi" fell by the wayside
over a decade ago. Are there really still any applications out there
that use the  %%BeginPreview ... %%EndPreview bitmap? It just seems like
useless and unnecessary bloat to me. It makes tex_demo.eps from the
examples/ directory 5 times larger than it need be!

Best Wishes

Will

> 


-- 
  Dr William Henney, Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica,
  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Campus Morelia