# [OS X TeX] Grapher.app and LaTeX Equations

Herbert Schulz herbs at wideopenwest.com
Tue Feb 26 17:37:39 EST 2008

Howdy,

Ludwig Kowalski, a new member on this list and a long time member of
the Phys-L mailing list for Physics Educators, recently noted that one
can use Grapher.app (in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder) to
generate LaTeX equations. I checked it out and it works, at least for
simple things. With his permission, here are his words from Phys-L:

It turns out that Grapher application (a free Macintosh utility) is
much more than a graphic calculator. This likely to be appreciated by
those who compose Latex input files. The most difficult (and error-
prone) part of composing such files is to type mathematical formulas
correctly. Last night I typed the

y=x/2*sqrt(x)

in Grapher (in order to plot this simple function) and saved its Latex-
formated version

y=\frac{x}{2}\cdot \mbox{sqrt}\left( x \right)

into my clipboard. Then I pasted it into the Latex editor. The way to
accomplish this is simple.

a) Type the function and produce the plot.
b) Select the equation above the plotting area (it is already
mathematically-formatted by Grapher) and right-click on it.

That menu offers three formats to save the plot (one of them is JPG)
plus an option to save the Latex-formatted representation into the
clipboard. I selected the last option and pasted the clipboard content
into the Latex editor. That was it. Then I plotted another function,
selected its Grapher representation, and extracted the Latex-formated
version) into the clipboard. It worked very well again.

Ludwik Kowalski, a retired physisist
5 Horizon Road, apt.2702, Fort Lee, NJ, 07024, USA
Also an amateur journalist at http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)