I use Inkscape a lot. Particularly for drawing diagrams for my research. I use the TexText plugin for Inkscape to allow me to embed arbitrary LaTeX in documents. However, recently I’ve had an issue with it.
TexText uses pdf2svg to convert PDFs to SVGs to embed into an Inkscape project. Under the hood it runs pdflatex on the LaTeX fragment you provide, then it converts this to an SVG with a tight bounding box. This has been generating horribly pixelated fonts for me. The output of X+y=z is the following:
Having looked into it there are two ways to solve the problem
- The quick and simple way is to \usepackage{lmodern} at the top of your LaTeX preamble input to TexText – this forces latex to use type1 (scalable) fonts as opposed to type3 (bitmap) fonts.
- The longer term way is to maintain textext for our research group to use. This will involve dropping all backends other than the pdf2svg one. Simply for the reason that I have neither the resources nor inclination to support multiple backends. Each supported backend is a deep mine of bugs and I’m comfortable with the pdf2svg/poppler/cairo mine.
I do wonder though, why LaTeX prefers type3 fonts over their type1 brethren.