Most of the problems I had with this stem from the fact that Mathematica uses both absolute and relative (to the plot size) measurements. I found it's best to print figures at the final publication size, and check their quality that way. It is difficult to compare line thicknesses on screen, especially when the displayed thickness would get close to 1 pixel. Without the quotes, PDF export is a non-starter due to screwed-up fonts. WithĮdit: Accepting Szabolcs' answer, but Mr.Wizard should be given credit for pointing out the FontFamily -> Helvetica vs FontFamily -> "Helvetica" behavior (which seems like a bug). But then the fonts are too small and/or lines in the plot look too thin, etc, etc. However, using AbsoluteThickness looks bad - so I have to increase ImageSize. to place it as an inset), it would trash the quality. (b) The frame/tick lines are light-gray and 1 pixel thick. Looks good on screen (see screenshot), but export it into EPS and you'll probably see two things: (a) There's a bug with EPS font embedding: for me, the epsilon inside the figure doesn't embed properly unless I remove the FontWeight->Normal directive. Is there a better way and/or a standard prescription to follow in order to achieve balanced, good-looking plots?Įdit: here's one example. This is somewhat unsatisfactory and time consuming. So, my current approach involves taking five parameters - three line thicknesses (in FrameStyle, AxesStyle, and PlotStyle), ImageSize, and FontSize in BaseStyle - and randomly tweaking them until the exported plot looks acceptable. Quite often, the lines in frames and tick marks end up being too faint in the EPS file, and when trying to do something like FrameStyle->AbsoluteThickness, it is easy to get lines that are too thick. The way the final result looks seems to be somewhat format-dependent (with EPS working best in my experience). Although things have much improved in recent years, it is still hard to get consistent results when exporting to files.
It seems that creating publication-quality graphics with mma is a black art that dates back decades.
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