5.4 Example 4: Something Completely Different

In this example, we demonstrate something rather different that PyXPlot can do. There is a common problem of trying to incorporate L^ATEXed equations into various multimedia/graphics packages: the postscript format which L^ATEX produces is not supported by programs such as Microsoft Powerpoint. PyXPlot offers a very quick and simple solution to this problem.

First of all, we set our terminal to produce png output. To overlay our output onto a Powerpoint slide, we will want it to have a transparent background, and so we also use the ``transparent'' terminal option (see section 3.2 for a discussion of PyXPlot terminal options). Finally, if we're producing a Powerpoint presentation with light-coloured text on a dark background, we will want to invert the colours to have white text, and so use the ``invert'' terminal option.

We can now produce plots which can readily be imported into Powerpoint. To produce L^ATEXed equations, we use the multiplot environment's text command (see section 3.5).

Finally, as such a figure would not be very easy to incorporate into this User Manual, we produce a normal eps version of our equation, illustrating how to use the refresh command to produce multiple copies of the same figure in different graphic formats.

The output is shown in figure 5.4.

PyXPlot Script:

examples/example4