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

[Gary L. Gray]

On Jun 26, 2006, at 12:56 PM, Jung-Tsung Shen wrote:

> 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
> Computer Modern fonts don't follow Adobe's PostScript font naming
> 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.

This actually is a known solution (at least by me) from way back when  
people used to do similar stuff with Textures and AI. I would be  
concerned about two things:

(1) the portability (others may be able to comment on this issue)  
since I suspect that whoever you send files to will have to have the  
fonts installed in the same way

(2) the fact that you can't use pdflatex

That's my 2 cents.

Regards,
   Gary


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