Re: [Matplotlib-users] =?iso-8859-1?q?using_different_font_families?= =?iso-8859-1?q?=09with=3FLaTeX-generated_text?=

[Darren D. <dd...@co...>]

On Wednesday 16 May 2007 01:29:56 pm Alexander Schmolck wrote:
> Darren Dale <dd...@co...> writes:
> > On Monday 14 May 2007 1:29:05 pm Alexander Schmolck wrote:
> >> Darren Dale <dd...@co...> writes:
> >> I'd *really* like the ability to ``usepackage`` for various reasons and
> >> it would clearly add useful functionality that is not otherwise
> >> obtainable.
> >>
> >> I understand concern about an additional support burden, but couldn't
> >> this be handled by explicitly noting that it's unsupported, possibly
> >> even printing out an unsubtle warning
>
> [...]
>
> > As far as I'm concerned, being unsupported disqualifies the feature from
> > being included in mpl.
>
> Well, if ever there was a compelling use-case for an
> undocumented/unsupported feature it would be this one, I think.
>
> We are talking about something that involves very little implementation
> effort (< 5 LOC or so), right? So provided it doesn't result in either an
> implementation burden or in additional support requests, why wouldn't you
> allow people to obtain functionality, at their own risk, that may be of
> high utility to them?
>
> For example, I use a few lower-case bold greek symbols in my work, and I
> also want to use them in my plots. Due to some arbitrary braindamage in
> latex, this essentially requires a ``\usepackage{bm}`` somewhere in your
> preamble, and there are other fairly standard things are as far as I can
> see impossible to obtain without (if it doesn't cause portability hassles
> of the type you mentioned etc., I think it might actually be worth-while
> considering to add things like 'bm' and 'ammssymb' to the
> default-preamble).
>
> I don't think me and other users editing texmanager by hand or resulting to
> some really nasty hacks in order to just extend simple template string
> being a better solution (or one that necessarily results in fewer support
> requests -- "oops, sorry I just noticed I actually screwed around with this
> file in order to change my latex-preamble").
>
> It wouldn't even be necessary to add some proper latex_preamble option, as
> long as there is some TexManager attribute that's easily enough to modify.

I'll give this some more thought.