Best way to use marker shapes in caption (not in igor.)

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Mon, 06/08/2015 - 05:53 pm

I'm writing for a paper which requires figure explanations in the caption. Essentially figures aren't allowed to have legends and the different traces are supposed to be explained in the caption.

So I need to be able to use the trace markers (full blue circle, empty blue circle, full red square, etc. etc.) in an external program(this manuscript must be submitted in word or LaTex format.) Is there any good way to do this? (The captions must be submitted in the text file, not attached to the figures.)
Now that are some rather odd rules.

I've attached a EPS file which holds all markers and makers with lines of Igor. You can with Adobe Illustrator or similiar programs extract each symbol and copy it to word or save it as a single eps/pdf file and include in latex.

Hope that helps
Thomas

PS: I can also post the igor code if you want to play with it more.
All-Igor-Markers.zip

June 9, 2015 at 09:18 am - Permalink

If you have colored the markers, or perhaps made the fill and stroke for a marker different colors, the combinations will make any sort of archive of marker shapes difficult to maintain...

When faced with a problem like that (for instance, when preparing Igor help files) I usually make a graph with the appropriate things in it. For instance, you could make a legend with all your markers, export the graph window containing that legend to a high-resolution PNG file, display the PNG in your image editor of choice and extract the symbol you need to paste into your figure caption.

Cumbersome, but it works.

You could also prepare your figure captions in graph textboxes. That way you can include marker symbols and such directly using textbox escape sequences.

John Weeks
WaveMetrics, Inc.
support@wavemetrics.com

June 9, 2015 at 10:08 am - Permalink

A journal after my own heart. :-)

I might suggest two options.

1. Put the graph and caption on a layout. You can use the \s(wave..) commands in the caption text. The downside is, you should know in advance what size your figures will be. Suppose you have two figures of each the same full A4 size with a caption at 12pt. Your journal scales the first by 40% and the second 25%. This will very sloppy looking. When you can be assured that all of your printed figures will be printed with the same aspect ratio and major dimension, you should do this.

2. You can generate your graphs to size properly and put your captions in using a different app. You will have to capture the symbols externally as others have mentioned. I can recommend the LaTeX \color command takes RGB input values that can be fit exactly to the RGB input values of the symbol colors. I can also recommend to use words. So ...

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{tikz, graphicx}

\newcommand*{\redcircle}{
    {\color[rgb]{1,0,0}
    \begin{tikzpicture}
    \draw (2,2) circle (0.1cm);
    \end{tikzpicture}
    }}

\begin{document}

\includegraphics{... your graphics file here}

{\sf Figure 1:} ... hello world (open red circle \redcircle{})

\end{document}


--
J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAHuntsville

June 9, 2015 at 05:40 pm - Permalink