# [OS X TeX] Alternative Method of Labeling Figures with Illustrator

Jung-Tsung Shen jushen at gmail.com
Mon Jun 26 18:56:41 CEST 2006

Hi, I recently came across a very interesting method to label figures
with Illustrator.

During the past, I have been using the wonderful WARMFigToPDF to label
figures ( http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/WFTPDF/ ). WARMFigToPDF works
very well, and suits my purpose wonderfully. The new method, as
described below, however, involves less steps, and to some people,
might have the appeal of being somewhat more direct.

>From the author:

=====================================
Most graphing programs do not allow you to typeset complicated axis
labels. It can be particularly difficult to create labels that include
mathematical symbols. It would be nice if you could simply generate
the labels in LaTeX and drop them into the Illustrator document.

In fact, you can. The only impediment to doing this is that the
convention and so aren't recognized by Illustrator. Alberto Arabia's
Tex-Illustrator fonts package provides Type 1 PostScript versions of
Computer Modern with the correct names:

http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~arabia/TeX/TeX-Illustrator.sea.hqx
http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~arabia/TeX/TeX-Cyr-Illustrator.sea.hqx

(These and other free font sets are available from
http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex. A very good commercial alternative is
the OpenType font UniMath from Applied Symbols.) On MacOS X, the fonts
should be installed in the /Library/Application
Support/Abode/Fonts/Reqrd/ directory.

When creating a label, it's best to use the minimal latex document
class, which suppresses page numbers, headers, footers, and whatnot;
e.g.,

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
$1/\sqrt{\bar{N}_{\text{c}}}$
\end{document}

=========================

The author is Kevin Beach ( http://people.bu.edu/ksdb/ ). You can take
a look at the method, with further information, here (
http://people.bu.edu/ksdb/eps_tips.html ).

I have briefly tested the method myself, and it worked perfectly. The
only problem I had actually was to produce the exact output as in the
example in the author's web page (the  division symbol, "/", showed up
as a rotated triangle in my PDF output); but for every other examples
I devised, it worked flawlessly. I would be very interested if the
members and experts of this forum could have further examination.

Regards,
JT
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