Annotating Mathematica EPS files with Illustrator
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg46508] Annotating Mathematica EPS files with Illustrator
- From: kc144 at woh.rr.com (Kevin Gross)
- Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 22:58:43 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hi folks, I know that some of you annotate Mathematica EPS graphics using Adobe Illustrator. How are you able to do that while (1) using the Mathematica fonts and font combinations (e.g. the greek letter nu with a tilde on top, i.e. from the front end, type <ESC> nu <ESC> <CTRL 7> ~) (2) automatically preserving the bounding box info? I'm looking for any tips that can be used to have Mathematica output a high-quality EPS file that can be imported by and annotated in Illustrator and subsequently conversion to PDF. I obtained Illustrator and Distiller for this purpose, but the long story below details my unsuccessful trip down this path. Thanks, Kevin ---The long story--- Mathematica 5 on Mac OSX (10.3.2) Adobe Illustrator CS (11.0) Adobe Distiller (6.0.1) I exported a Mathematica graphic as an EPS file with the fonts embedded, which can be found here: <http://kc144.dyndns.org/~kevin/plot-FontIncl.eps.gz> It was converted to PDF using Preview.app (image viewer that ships w/ OSX) and is found here: <http://kc144.dyndns.org/~kevin/plot-FontIncl.pdf> I can open the EPS file using Illustrator, but parentheses, minus signs and greek text don't show up properly. This seems odd as Illustrator can see the Mathematica fonts. (For those who speak Mac OSX: Mathematica.dfont installed in ~/Library/Fonts and the fonts are accessible from within Illustrator). Opening the PDF is slightly better, but nu with a tilde on top shows up as a question mark. Then I thought Illustrator would be happy if it opened up a PDF created by its cousin Distiller. The resulting PDF file has the right fonts, but now the bounding box is wrong. I'm using the Standard presets for Distiller which, according to the documentation, uses the %%BoundingBox comment to determine the page size of the PDF. Opening this PDF in Illustrator still gives a question mark for the nu with a tilde on top. I also tried the same excercise but with an EPS file that did not include the Mathematica fonts. Import to Illustrator resulted in Courier being substituted for many characters. Why when it can see the Mathematica fonts? Distiller correctly picks up the Mathematica fonts but still has the bounding box issue and nu-tilde still shows up as a question mark. ARG! And even if I get this font problem resolved, it looks as if I'll need to manually set the page dimensions from within Illustrator. I assumed that by opening the EPS file, the canvas size would be automatically set to what was in the %%BoundingBox comment. So is this a problem with the Mathematica-generated postscript file or did the Adobe, the authors of postscript, supply flakey PS parsers in their Illustrator and Distiller programs? Or have I completely missed something?