[OS X TeX] Using Latin Modern fonts for symbols in PowerPoint

[Joshua Smith]

On Jun 10, 2012, at 8:27 PM, David Watson wrote:

> On Jun 6, 2012, at 10:34 AM, Joshua Smith wrote:
>> When I change the font of the a from Helvetica to LM Roman Slanted 10 Regular, it matches the a in the equation identically.  However, when I insert an alpha symbol from PowerPoint's Insert > Symbol menu and then change the font of the symbol to be LM Roman 10 Regular, it does not match the equation whatsoever.
>> 
>> Is there any way to achieve what I am interested in doing, other than to typeset the individual symbols in LaTeXiT and space the text so that I can insert images of the symbols in the proper place?
> 
> You may want to try using the Character Viewer.
> You can get to it from the System Preferences -> Language & Text -> Input Sources.
> You may also want to check the box "Show Input menu in menu bar" so that you can easily get to it.
> 
> Search for "alpha" in the Character Viewer, click on an appropriate symbol, and then click around in the Font Variation pane until you find that symbol in the Latin Modern font. If you have PowerPoint as the front application, double clicking on the proper symbol in the proper font should give you the results you want.

I had been looking in the Character Viewer, but I had not added the Greek letters to the listing of symbols and I was not aware of the Font Variation pane, since it you have to scroll past the Releated Characters to get to it.  Unfortunately, your suggestion did work.  First, I could not find the alpha in Latin Modern.  Second, double clicking on any alpha inserted it in the font that was active in the application, not the font selected in the Font Variation pane.  Third, with Latin Modern as the active font in PowerPoint, the inserted alpha really did not match that well.

I ended up following Pete's suggestion to look into LaTeXit, but it took a bit of effort.  For those who might be curious, I had to modify the preamble with the following to get Helvetica font with no hyphenation:

\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{phv}
\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}

Second, since my text had to fit in a certain width, I had to use a tabular environment, as LaTeXiT did not want to obey any paper width commands with the geometry package:

\begin{tabular}{p{4.6in}}
A few lines of text with math symbols, such as $\alpha$, in it.
\end{tabular}

Then, I typeset using the Text option of LaTeXiT.  Note, for whatever reason, LaTeXiT scaled the width of the tabular environment by a factor of 3.  So, for a text box that was 14 inches wide with internal left and right margins of 0.1 inch each, I had to use a tabular width of 4.6 inches to get an actual text width of 13.8 inches.

This solved my problem, but it was by no means ideal.

Thanks,
Josh