[OS X TeX] Scale factor in LaTeXiT, and/or extensible braces in Illustrator

[Bruno Voisin]

I have just been using LaTeXiT to produce a horizontal brace for  
inclusion in an Illustrator CS 2 diagram. I'm looking for a brace  
exactly 117 pt long. The following did work:

\underbrace{\makebox[117pt]{}}

However, when exported to a PDF file then opened by Illustrator, the  
brace turns out to be 280.6 pt long -- says Illustrator. After a bit  
of (puzzled) thinking, this seems to be be connected with a scale  
factor of 2.4 (yielding 280.8 pt) which LaTeXiT is implicitly  
applying to its any dimension specified in its LaTeX input. The scale  
factor seems related with LaTeXiT's default preamble using 10 pt size  
characters:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}

and LaTeXiT's Size setting having 24.00 pt default value.

This is corrected (the scale factor is reset to 1) by changing the  
Size setting to 10.00 pt, but I did not see -- looking very rapidly  
-- any mention of a default scale factor in LaTeXiT's documentation.  
This is not really a problem (a PDF object can be resized afterwards  
to any size, including in Illustrator), but the issue might confuse  
some users.

On a side note: does anybody know an alternative way of producing an  
extensible brace in Illustrator?

Bruno Voisin
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