What is the best way to make a plot complete with legends so it is exported-ready for Word?

Question

I want to put my Plot output into an MS Word document without having to edit it in Corel first, so I want to export it ready for Word in vector format complete with legends, expressions, axes, and frames. Is it possible to do that in Mathematica 9? After getting Plot output, what procedure should I follow to put it into Word?

I want the best quality figures in my Word document with thin colored lines. Here is example of what I to do when I have many curves on one plot, using dashed and dotdashed combination.

  Plot[{Sin[x], Sin[2 x], Sin[3 x], Sin[4 x], 1/x}, {x, 0, 2 Pi}, 
    PlotLegends -> "Expressions"]

I look forward to seeing your examples of multi-curve plots that are Word export-ready.

Answer 1

The built-in Legend package is really bad. A good alternative is legendMaker and is fully documented here. Assuming you loaded this package, you can use this code, from your example:

plot = Plot[{Sin[x], Sin[2 x], Sin[3 x], Sin[4 x], 1/x}, {x, 0, 2 Pi},
   Frame -> True, FrameLabel -> (Style[#, 16] & /@ {"x", "f(x)"})]
labels = {Sin[x], Sin[2 x], Sin[3 x], Sin[4 x], Superscript[x, -1]};
opts = Sequence[Background -> LightOrange, RoundingRadius -> 10];
newPlot = 
 Overlay[{plot, legendMaker[labels, opts]}, Alignment -> {0.8, 0.9}]

The result is:

Having plotted everything you need, saving as PDF is easy - just use

Export["foo.pdf",plot]

The result is vector graphics with full quality and is scalable. You can then include the PDF file in your Word document, or better yet, in $\LaTeX$.

Answer 2

Until now I have been unable to import vector graphics into a distributable Word file. The first thing I do is decide on a specific style I use throughout a notebook, e.g.

opts = BaseStyle -> {20, FontFamily -> "Times", Italic};

Then I simply save the plots with code such as

image = Show[graph, ImageSize -> 1024]; Export[name, image, "JPEG"]

and insert the JPG-image into the Word file. You would have to make sure that the size of your PlotLegends etc. fit the image size. The results are usually more than reasonably good. However, I usually go through several rounds of adaptations until I am satisfied.