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  • Figures
    •  Including
    •  Creating
    •  Reducing Size
    •  Labeling
• MakeIndex
• Posters
  • Illustrator
• Fonts & Symbols

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Labeling Figures

TeXShop or LaTeXiT are two applications that can be used to produce mathematical text for labeling figures.

Labeling figures with Illustrator or WARMFigToPDF

• Labeling Figures with LaTeX
  
• WARMFigToPDF, by Gary Gray:
  • Example of Usage
• PDF-Processing-Apps: PDF Cropper & TeX Font Outliner, by Gary Gray (download)

LaTeXiT in Illustrator & Keynote

See Ari Stern's Homepage for Podcasts with tutorials on

• Using LaTeXiT
  • Introduction to LaTeXiT; Using Keynote with LaTeXiT and LinkBack [12 MB Quicktime]
  • Creating 2D Figures with Adobe Illustrator and LaTeXiT [14 MB Quicktime]
  • Creating 3D Figures with Adobe Illustrator and LaTeXiT [6 MB Quicktime]
  
  
• Adding Transparency
  • Adding Transparency to 3D Figures [5 MB Quicktime]

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PDF-Processing-Apps to Label Figures with TeXShop and Illustrator

Gary Gray from the Penn State University has provided a nice collection of PDF processing applications to properly crop text that has been typsest with TeXShop and using the text as outlines to label figures in Adobe Illustrator.

Gary Gray wrote:

As I posted earlier, I have a simple little ''AppleScript app that will properly crop the PDF by dragging and dropping the file on the app''. Here is the procedure we use to label figures---it includes the cropping aspect.

The general idea is that you can create the labels in a .tex file, convert the fonts in the resulting .pdf file to Postscript outlines, open that .ps file in AI, and then copy and post those outlines in the AI figure file. The steps are as follows:

1. Download the archive at:

   http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/PDF-Processing-Apps.zip

2. Create your figure in AI and save it as "Adobe PDF (pdf)". I will

assume it is called "test.pdf".

3. Create the labels for your figure in a .tex file. I will assume

it is called "labels.tex".

4. Typeset the labels.tex file using pdflatex and then drop the

resulting labels.pdf file on "TeX Font Outliner.app"

5. After you drop the .pdf file on "TeX Font Outliner.app", the

resulting .ps file will automatically open in AI. Copy the labels from the .ps file and place the labels in the figure you saved in part (1), i.e., in test.pdf

6. Move the labels into position and save test.pdf.
   
7. Drop test.pdf onto "PDF Cropper.app". This will rename test.pdf

to test-AI.pdf (so that you will have your original file for later editing) and then it will crop that file by removing all white space and it will name the cropped file test.pdf.

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That's all there is to it. I have only tested this with AI CS2 and CS3, though it should work with earlier versions with a slight modification of the AppleScript. Both apps are universal binary.

We have labeled hundreds of figures this way over the past couple of years and it really works exceedingly well.

-- Gary

(Gary also runs the TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List. See the archives here.)