Re: [Matplotlib-users] Latex, Labels and PDF

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

On Tuesday 24 July 2007 9:50:46 am Peter W=FCrtz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I ran into some troubles when trying to do the following with
> matplotlib:
> 	- plotting a figure
> 	- using latex for axis labels
> 	- (getting acceptable fonts)
> 	- getting a pdf in the end
> I've not been able to solve this.
>
> In the documentation I found 2 ways to do this. First, when a string is
> enclosed in $ signs, matplotlib has its own way of rendering latex code.
> Thats ok for mathematical expressions, but I can't print normal text at
> all. The documentation says that \rm{} should be used, but
>
> "$\rm{some label text} (\mu V)$" becomes "somelabeltext\muV"

I think you need to use raw strings so your \'s are interpretted as \'s and=
=20
not as special characters (like \n is newline). We know it is inconvenient=
=20
that you cant do something like r'This example: $a=3De^{i\pi}$' with the=20
existing mathtext, but it is a difficult problem and remains unsolved.

> so I searched again and found another documentation, telling me to
> enable 'text.usetex' so all text is handled by latex. This way, the text
> is rendered correctly, but then the font used for the tick numbers
> switches to some ugly looking font.

=46or starters, see http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/UsingTex. I su=
ggest=20
changing your serif rc settings to use the PSNFSS fonts described in that=20
link. Also, try deleting your ~/.matplotlib/tex.cache.

> Because Latex mode does not seem to work with the pdf output,=20

It doesn't, not yet.

> I saved=20
> these figures as EPS, using epstopdf in oder to get a pdf. Normally this
> process gives me perfect results, but the ugly-font-ticks problem is
> getting even worse, because in the pdf some of them are just missing.

Try getting your system set up to use the xpdf distiller, that has always=20
given me excellent results.

> I upped the eps and pdf files here:
> http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/wuertz/matplotlib/
> There is also a png file with a screenshot from the "ugly" and missing
> ticks.
>
> Plotting a reasonable figure seems to be hard, is there any chance of
> solving this problem?

There have been many problems reported on this mailing list that concern la=
tex=20
markup. Most often, people have difficulty getting usetex to work because=20
matplotlib depends on latex, dvipng, ghostscript, and optionally xpdf (more=
=20
precisely, xpdf's pdftops utility). If those dependencies are not working=20
properly, or if you are missing latex packages or fonts, then it shows up i=
n=20
mpl's output.

Darren