Advanced Typography Features

MagicPlot provides accurate typography in text labels and axes labels. You may toggle some features in 'Typography' tab of MagicPlot Preferences.

Typography tab in MagicPlot Preferences window

Ligatures Support

MagicPlot supports Latin ligatures in text labels. If you type 'fi', 'fl', etc., those symbols will be shown with ligature glyphs when you exit edit mode.

Edit mode
Result

MagicPlot supports the following ligatures:

fi, fl

ff, ffi, ffl

Not all fonts contain ligature glyphs. MagicPlot displays ligatures only if the glyphs are included in used font. You can turn the ligatures off in MagicPlot preferences.

Mathematical Symbols in Axes Labels

The numbers in scientific notation need two special characters if you want the typography to be accurate: minus sign and multiplication sign. Many graphing software applications which use simplified typography use letter 'x' and hyphen-minus (-) in numbers instead of typographically correct special characters. This simplified typography was mainly used in old applications which do not support Unicode.

MagicPlot can use either correct symbols (default) or simplified. You can change this option in MagicPlot Preferences.

Minus Sign

Various minus-like characters are used in different cases and have different height and length. The height and length of minus sign are equal to those of plus sign and corresponds to the size of digits in the font. Here is a comparison of these characters:

Plus and minus signs

When you edit some text keyboard minus key enters hyphen-minus character. The correct minus character can be typed in text label by pressing Ctrl+M, -, see Inserting Special Symbols for details.

Multiplication Sign

The multiplication sign is different in various languages. In most cases you have to use either '·' or '×' sign. You also can specify any special character or character sequence, for example enter spaces before and after multiplication signs.

Multiplication sign Correct minus sign
Middle dot Correct minus sign
Simplified typography: Latin letter 'x' hyphen-minus instead of minus

See Also

Inserting Special Symbols and Greek Letters