Graphics: Title and label properties

[John W. Eaton]

On 22-Jul-2008, John W. Eaton wrote:

| On 22-Jul-2008, Michael Goffioul wrote:
| 
| | On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Daniel J Sebald <daniel.sebald at ieee.org> wrote:
| | > How much of a subset will the "mid-level" parser support?  Just simple TeX
| | > constructs like subscript ('_'), superscript ('^'), and a few others?
| | 
| | Of course, we're talking here about the same set of TeX constructs that are
| | supported by the competition, which is only a subset of TeX syntax.
| 
| I think we should also leave open the possibility of actually passing
| the text to TeX (or LaTeX) and getting a (scalable?) graphics object
| back so that we can fully support TeX (or LaTeX) markup, not just some
| subset.  It is probably not necessary to do this from the beginning,
| but we should not make it hard to do later.

We should also look at matplotlib to see what it is doing.  I met John
Hunter (the original author of matplotlib) yesterday and he noted that
they are parsing simple LaTeX themselves but allow the option of
passing text to an external latex processor.  They are also using the
actual layout algorithms of TeX when they do the parsing and layout
without the real TeX processor.  The parser is written in Python and I
think the layout code is too, so this might require some adaptation
unless we would want to require Python to run Octave...

jwe