typesetting

Math on the Web: Still flaky

Sometimes, much to the chagrin of my non-scientific readers, one of my articles hits on a concept that really needs a bit of math to be properly explored. One or two good equations (explained, of course) can be far more useful to the reader than a dense paragraph of math-as-English-sentences.

Math on Web pages, though, is still really flaky. Despite worldwide efforts to standardize on a math markup format that will work anywhere on the Web, support in certain browsers remains bad enough that we're still stuck with ugly hacks.

How to get presentable graphs and figures from MATLAB

MATLAB is great for making high-quality figures for publication. It has a pretty steep learning curve, though, if you're used to spreadsheets.

MATLAB's huge advantage for graphing is that everything can be tuned and tweaked with commands and scripts. You only have to fuss over the first graph in a series; once you have everything the way you want it to look, you can use the same formatting script on all your other graphs. Presto, they all look good and they all match.

How to get presentable graphs and figures from Excel

Excel's default settings for graphs often result in something a bit ugly, and getting those graphs out of Excel can be a finicky process. Font sizes get screwed up, the top and right tickmarks are usually missing by default, and so forth...

So, here's my quick reference for getting Excel plots to look the way I want them to look, so that they will show up as intended when used with a proper typesetting system such as LaTeX.

This seems to work for Excel 2007/2010 and XP/2003

Get the chart on its own page

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