Re: Graphics: Title and label properties

[John Swensen]

On Jul 22, 2008, at 5:38 PM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:

> 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

Another place to look might be the python matplotlib.  I know they  
support a large subset of Latex for their axes and titles, and I think  
it can either generate a PDF, PS, or even CAIRO bitmap buffers.

John Swensen