Latex Greek Mathematics Subcripts Superscripts

[DarrelRobertson]

I see these have been asked for several times before but isn't implemented yet and just wanted to throw in another request for this feature. Specifically I want to put units on the "Custom Title" for Legend Annotation Objects. I have units such as per microsecond for which the Greek mu and ability to use a superscript would be useful. Adding Latex support for any text so it doesn't need to be imported as an image would be much appreciated. Many thanks for your consideration.

[JustinPrivitera]

I have opened an issue (#20350) for this request.

[markcmiller86]

@DarrelRobertson, I am just curious, is this for annotating a single image, a group of images, or maybe a movie?

I worry about VisIt team expending resources to handle these kinds of advanced scenarios when there are a lot of other tools available that, even after all the hard work we might put in, would still render a better result.

For example, I tried using LaTex+ImageMagick's convert to do something...

miller86% cat equation.tex 
% equation.tex
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
$\int_2^\infty e^{-x^2} dx = \frac{\sqrt{\pi}}{2}$
\end{document}
miller86% pdflatex equation.tex
miller86% convert -density 300 -background none equation.pdf equation.png
miller86% convert foo.png equation.png -geometry +100+100 -composite output.png

Before Image

After Image

If you are familiar with shell or python scripting, I'd bet you could script up something pretty quickly that would get you the desired result and you'd be much happier with it than anything we could provide.

In fact, I know other VisIt developers have had need for this in the past and created some tooling.

[markcmiller86]

FYI...after digging into some details associated with UTF8 encodings, we may have a small amount of work to ensure we handle the whole variety of characters available in modern encodings...certainly covering the case you mention regarding superscripting and/or subscripting. Stay tuned.

[DarrelRobertson]

Below is a simple example of a screenshot of a movie with a legend and the units I could write as m/s/s but m s^{-2} would be preferable if superscripts were possible. If I'm looking at a specific chemical such as oxygen O_2 with underscore would be preferable to just O2. The time listed is in microseconds so being able to specify that with a Greek mu would be preferable. None of it is a big problem, but I often end up having to annotate or alter the movies afterwards using other editing software, so it would certainly be nice if I could just add the labels easily when I make the images in VisIt. I was also hoping it would not be a large effort for you. I perhaps naively assumed there was a latex library you could include. If it really is difficult to add, no worries, but I saw it come up several times in past discussions. Many thanks for taking a look at this.