Exporting graphs with ploting program

Question

I use originPro software to plot the graphs. OriginPro can export Pdf files directly. However, when I insert symbols such as degree, it changes to something else after the compiling by LaTex. The font type used in the software is Symbol. This problem was resolved by exporting the graph to tiff; then, exporting it to pdf using photoshop or so. How I can export directly to pdf while keeping all the symbols same?

Answer 1

I have never used OriginPro, but one possibility is to export to PNG files which can be easily included by pdflatex.

Another possibility is to export the data which you want to plot into .txt files, then to plot the graphs using pgfplots. This is the approach which I use.

Using pgfplots has the following advantages:

• It is very easy to change the format of the graphs—you don't have to re-run OriginPro, all you need to do is to edit the LaTeX source code.
• The graphs generated by pgfplots use the same fonts as LaTeX and look extremely professional.
• In my opinion, pgfplots is relatively easy to learn (by reading the manual) and extremely customizable. Below is an example taken from the pgfplots manual to illustrate what the source code and output looks like:

\documentclass{standalone}

\usepackage{pgfplots}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
    \begin{axis}[
            xlabel=Cost,
            ylabel=Error]
        \addplot[color=red,mark=x] coordinates {
            (2,-2.8559703)
            (3,-3.5301677)
            (4,-4.3050655)
            (5,-5.1413136)
            (6,-6.0322865)
            (7,-6.9675052)
            (8,-7.9377747)
        };
    \end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}