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szhorvat / MaTeX

LaTeX labels in Mathematica
http://szhorvat.net/mathematica/MaTeX
MIT License
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Produce selectable text #4

Closed lucainnocenti closed 8 years ago

lucainnocenti commented 8 years ago

Hi, Do you think it would be possible to make the generated LaTeX text selectable?

PS: Awesome work! Your package is extremely useful.

szhorvat commented 8 years ago

No, unfortunately that is not possible. To make the text selectable, it would need to be actual text, and not just graphics (i.e. curves describing the shape of letters). Text in Mathematica doesn't have sufficient flexibility to faithfully reproduce LaTeX output.

Possible workarounds:

Most of the time when MaTeX is truly needed I am making labels which have complex formulae and wouldn't be practically copyable from a PDF anyway (even if parts of the formula are technically selectable). When I don't produce formulae, I do not use MaTeX. Instead I use actual Mathematica text with the Latin Modern Roman font to match LaTeX's visual style. There are a couple of examples in the tutorial.

You might also check out the MathPSfrag package, which solves more or less the same problem as MaTeX with different compromises. It should, in principle be able to produce selectable text, for as long as its output PDF is not imported back to Mathematica. (But again: what's the point of selecting formulae? They aren't practically copyable anyway.) I have not personally used this package because I was not aware of its existence when I originally wrote MaTeX. This means I haven't actually tested whether it does produce selectable text.