# TeX and the PDF Backend

Hi all,

While playing around with the TeX support in matplotlib (rc('text',
usetex=True)) and the PDF backend I noticed an interesting phenomena whereby
the summation symbol in my plot was rendered at a larger size than regular TeX
would produce.

Taking the following example as my basis
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/pylab_examples/tex_demo.html I
created a PDF and compared it, in Evince to a PDF with an equivalent math
section created by LaTeX.

Overlaying the two PDFs results in the following:
http://freddie.witherden.org/drop/matplotlibtex.png The bottom is the output
from matplotlib while the top LaTeX. For some reason the summation symbol is
larger in matplotlib than in LaTeX.

I have seemingly confirmed this with latex + dvipdfm and pdflatex.

Does anyone know what might be causing this? The document font sizes are the
same and I tried to match the LaTeX file as closely as possible to the one used
internally by matplotlib.

Polemically yours, Freddie.

I believe it is not just the size of font but the font itself should match.
Depending on your setting, the tex file generated by matplotlib
include preambles related with font setting. For example, below is
mine.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{type1cm}
\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{pnc}
\usepackage{helvet}
\usepackage{courier}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

And of course, the output is different from the output without these preambles.

So when you say,

···

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 5:09 AM, Freddie Witherden <freddie@...2573...> wrote:

Does anyone know what might be causing this? The document font sizes are the
same and I tried to match the LaTeX file as closely as possible to the one used
internally by matplotlib.

Did you match those font preambles also?
Also, is it just the pdf backend? What about other backend?

Regards,

-JJ