Re: [matplotlib-devel] latex in ps via psfrag

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

On Tuesday 17 May 2005 6:44 pm, John Hunter wrote:
> In honor of Darren trying to get his thesis printed using mpl figures,
> and encountering a lot of pain with fonts and mathtext, I added a
> psfrag latex backend today.  psfrag is a latex package that enables
> you to substitute sentinel strings in an eps figure with latex
> expressions (eg as in xfig).  You create an eps with a bunch of marker
> strings like "psmarker0" or "psmarker1" and then write a latex file
> that does the substitutions
>
> \psfrag{psmarker0}[bl][bl][2.000000][0.000000]{\TeX\ is Number
> $e^{-i\pi}$!} \psfrag{psmarker1}[bl][bl][1.000000][0.000000]{0}
>
> The LaTeX backend generates a *.eps file and a *.tex file.  You can
> then latex and dvips the tex file to get a true ps, or just embed the
> generated latex commands directly into your document.  This uses latex
> for all text elements, giving a unified font look and feel.

I don't know what to say, except, Thank you.

> Here is an example
>
>   > python examples/tex_demo.py -dLaTeX
>   > latex tex_demo.tex
>   > dvips -o tex_demo.ps tex_demo.dvi
>   > ggv tex_demo.ps
>
> There are a few problems
>
>   * the page width and figure placement in the latex document are off
>     center
>
>   * the text color is not being respected
>
>   * to get the width and height of the string, I tex the individual
>     strings separately, run dvips on them, and get the bounding box
>     from the generated file.  This all happens with caching in
>     matplotlib.texmanager.  Right now the fontsize is being ignored in
>     this process so the layout will be off for nonstandard font sizes
>     -- anything other than the default design size of latex which
>     defaults to 10pt I think.
>
>   * the text doesn't scale right if you provide a size arg to
>     includegraphics, eg [width=3D4.in]
>
> I'm sure these details can be worked out by someone who has the
> patience to read the psfrag manual closely and knows a bit about tex
> and dvips -- the backend is only 180 lines of code.  I'm kind of busy
> right now with other work, so I was hoping some enterprising soul
> would like to take this and run with it, polish it, fix it and test
> it....  Darren?  If not, I'll get to it as I can.
>
> Changes in CVS

I'll be on a bus 24 of the next 60 hours, to get to my brother's graduation=
=2E=20
I'll print out what is in cvs and the psfrag manual for the trip, and can't=
=20
wait to get my hands on the code when I get back.

Darren