Re: [Matplotlib-users] TeX in xlabel ?

[Chris B. <Chr...@no...>]

John Hunter wrote:
>>>>>>"Chris" == Chris Barker <Chr...@no...> writes:
> 
> 
>     Chris> Gary wrote:
>     >> Matplotlib doesn't support \text, and it requires that the
>     >> first and last characters of a TeX string be $.  I guess it
>     >> only processes mathmode.  Well, it can't do *everything*.
> 
> It is on the goals page (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/goals.html)
> to support embedded math strings like
> 
>   s = r'Mean ($\mu=5) and standard deviation ($\sigma=1$)'

did you mean:

s = r'Mean ($\mu=5$) and standard deviation ($\sigma=1$)'

I think there was a missing "$".

That would be nice.

> It would be nice to be able to choose one or the other --

that would be nice.

> It would be a monster job.  There is basically no way to factor tex
> into components -- it's a monolithic system, in part because of the
> heavy use of web macros.

Ah. too bad. It's nice to know you've looked into this some.

 > And web2c, the conversion of web/pascal to
> c, is GPLd and less permissive than the matplotlib license.  So
> embedding tex is a no-go, aside from size considerations.

web2c is essentially a compiler of sorts, isn't it? So there wouldn't be 
  any problem with distributing C code created by it would there? In any 
case, there are LOTS of commercial TeX distributions out there, so there 
must be a way. This doesn't address the other big issues, however.

AmiPro, the word processor bought by Lotus, then later turned into 
WordPro, used TeX to format math. I used it for years before I 
discovered LaTeX because it had such nice math rendering (MS Word's 
still sucks!). They somehow managed to embed it, so I suppose it can be 
done! That doesn't mean it's the least bit easy, however.

>  But there
> are some possibilities for improving what matplotlib already offers.

good news, of course.

> One is to fall back on tex where available as a command line tool (as
> pyx does, I believe), and use other command line tools to convert the
> dvi to png or some other raster format and then embed it.  This would
> require a few external libs and utilities, but it's certainly doable.

That would be a nice option, but I'd rather see a DVI driver built in to 
Matplotlib, than a raster format. That's how PyX does it. I guess that 
would require matplotlib to have the same fonts, however. Another option 
would be PDF or EPS, but that would probably only be convenient for PS 
and/or PDF output.

> Another idea I had while reading Knuth's "TeX: The Program" is to use
> the layout information in the TFM font metric files.  Apparently math
> fonts have additional layout information in them, like where to place
> superscripts.  I've looked at several tfm parsing implementations, and
> haven't found one yet that actually extracts this information; most
> extract the standard font information but not the special math
> information.  But if we could access this info, we could include the
> tfm files for common raster sizes and use the layout info crafted by
> the master himself.

very cool.

> A third possibility would be to support mathml, using some good mathml
> renderer.  Is there a good, free mathml rendering library - what does
> mozilla use for this?

good question. That would be nice, too.


-Chris

-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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