Re: Graphics: Title and label properties

[Daniel J Sebald]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 22-Jul-2008, Michael Goffioul wrote:
>
> | On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 4:32 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> | > I think we should also leave open the possibility of actually passing
> | > the text to TeX (or LaTeX) and getting a (scalable?) graphics object
> | > back so that we can fully support TeX (or LaTeX) markup, not just some
> | > subset.  It is probably not necessary to do this from the beginning,
> | > but we should not make it hard to do later.
> | 
> | Indeed. If anobody wants to consider how to interface with
> | TeX/LaTeX, please do so. I personally have no idea how this
> | could be done and what "information" could be obtained
> | from LaTeX.
>
> I think you could have it return a pdf file containing the label.  One
> place to look for ideas about how this could work would be the
> preview-latex package for Emacs.  See for example the description here
> http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/preview-latex.html and the links to
> screenshots, particularly this one:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/img/preview-screenshot.png

Looks good.  One thing to keep in mind is that one of the better uses combines 
LaTeX typesetting and PostScript graphical elements.  (That's one of the 
driving factors of using gnuplot and xfig.)  LaTeX's limited graphics 
capability is often lacking or doesn't look so good...arrows are noticeably 
bad.  XDVI doesn't handle this combination as well as it could, so one ends up 
creating a more finished product with dvips and viewing with gv.

The interesting thing about this preview-latex is that it apparently uses a 
style file

http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/preview/preview.dtx

to isolate various sub-elements of a LaTeX document.  There is some mention of 
dvi and gv, so perhaps all the necessary flexibility is there.

Dan