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in Veaux’s Journal | Working toward the heat death of the Universe, one joule at a time! Franklin Veaux’s Journal Working toward the heat death of the Universe, one joule at a time! SearchHome Profile Post navigation ← Older posts Setting Math in Adobe Illustrator: The Impossible Dream Posted on May 13, 2024 by tacit Reply A while back, I posted on social media: I did not suspect, Gentle Reader, just how many people would have questions about this, nor how many of them there would be. Especially over on Quora, where it raised quite an interesting discussion. So, in the interests of elaborating, so that I can refer people to this entry: The equation is real. It’s the Higgs field Lagrangian, the equation that describes how the Higgs gives mass to massive particles. (On a side note, the Higgs field is only a small part of the inertial mass of everyday objects; more than 90% of the mass of things in our normal world comes not from the Higgs, but from the binding energy in the particles that make up those things). I needed the Higgs Lagrangian for a porn novel Eunice and I are planning but haven’t yet started working on. Specifically, I’m noodling about with an image for that novel, and I needed the Higgs Lagrangian in Adobe Illustrator. This is the image I’m noodling about with. Everything here, including the face, is vector, built entirely in Illustrator, not raster. If you look at the largest gold band, that’s the Higgs Lagrangian. I realize that Illustrator is not in fact an appropriate tool for typesetting math. The proper tool for this is LaTeX; indeed, it’s what LaTeX was created for. And I did in fact originally create the equation in LaTeX, and exported it to SVG to place in Illustrator. Thereupon I found a problem. I want to set the equation on a curve. And it is indeed possible to set an image like a PDF or SVG placed into Illustrator on a curve. But Illustrator treats placed images as, well images, which means if you set them along a curve, it will distort them. Here’s what I mean. On the top, the Higgs Lagrangian set as type in Illustrator, which did in fact take me about two hours to do; below that, exported from LaTeX; and below that, exported from LaTeX and placed on a curve. And honestly that would simply not do. So I set it as type in Illustrator. That required, among other things, installing a typesetting font on my computer to use in Illustrator (New Computer Modern, available here , just in case any other Illustrator users should run into a problem typesetting math equations in Illustrator and stumble across this post in the future), and frequent trips to the Wikipedia list of mathematical symbols here to copy-paste characters into Illustrator in New Computer Modern Math Regular). I did all this because getting the equation set as type in Illustrator meant I could use Illustrator’s type on a path tool to curve the type while perfectly preserving the shape of each letter. This also meant it would print smoothly as vectors. I could bend the type in a different graphics program, but any raster (pixel) program would break the letters up into pixels, meaning they look slightly fuzzy on press. Illustrator’s math typesetting is, bluntly, nonexistent. Which honestly surprises me. I’ve used Illustrator since 1988 and the fact it doesn’t have any typesetting library for math still surprises me. They could, for instance, easily license, oh, I don’t know, something like LaTeX…but I digress. You can do superscripts and subscripts, but it treats them as text in a line, like X2adoesn’t work correctly on superscripts and subscripts that have to be aligned one right under the other. For that, I had to type the superscript, type the subscript, and set the superscript’s tracking to -1000 to scoot it over the subscript. Big pain in the ass. The whole equation took a ton of ugly hackery like that (and if you’re reading this because it’s six years after I wrote it and you’re searching for a way to set math in Illustrator, you’re welcome, and also, cry havoc, you mad bastard). Anyway, I got it done, if not perfectly than at least acceptably, but my god, those are hours of my life I’ll never have back. Share this: Facebook X Email Reddit Twitter Like this: Like Loading... Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged design , geek , pictures , publishing , science , writing | Leave a reply There and Around and Back Again Posted on April 28, 2024 by tacit 3 I am not, it must be said, the sort of person who gets to the airport early. I am the sort of person who rolls up to the gate just as they start boarding, then says hmm, I’m in Boarding Group 8, that means I have time to dash down the hallway to grab a bite to eat.” (I’m serious. I’ve done this. My wife hates it.) And so it came to pass that I woke on the morning of my recent trip to Springfield, started packing, and then saw a message from the airline: they’d canceled my flight and put me on another, scheduled to depart an hour and a half earlier. Folks, if you ever see the distant gray not-a-moon shape of the Death Star in a clear blue sky over your home town, panic will not do to you what it did to me when I saw that text. I grabbed whatever was close to hand and shoved it frantically into the suitcase: a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, maybe some socks I think? (I’d already packed the important stuff, the sex toy prototypes, the night before; I’m not a complete barbarian.) I will spare you the harrowing and wildly improbable roller-coaster tale of what happened next—arriving just in time to discover that flight had also been canceled, flying standby on yet another—and← Older posts Search Type your email… Subscribe Recent Posts Setting Math in Adobe Illustrator: The Impossible Dream There and Around and Back Again A Trip to the Dominionate On Being a Writer in the Age of AI Some Thoughts on Bad Sex Books I’ve written: The Brazen Altar: Far-future, post-scarcity science fiction theocratic erotica, with Eunice Hung Divine Burdens: Far-future, post-scarcity erotic horror with a very kinky twist. The Hallowed Covenant: Third in the Passionate Pantheon far-future erotic science fiction series. 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