Make Positioning Related to Tex More Consistent

Consider the following two images:

class HigherDot(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        text = Tex("Aa")
        dot = Dot()
        dot.next_to(text, RIGHT)
        self.add(text, dot)
class LowerDot(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        text = Tex("ga")
        dot = Dot()
        dot.next_to(text, RIGHT)
        self.add(text, dot)

HigherDot:

LowerDot:

You can see that the dot is aligned differently relative to the “a” because the top and bottom of each Tex object is different. I feel like there needs to be some way of consistently positioning things relative to (Math)Tex objects. I can’t think of any simple way to do it, but I still feel like it should be done somehow.

[cobordism]

I fear this isn’t possible. When we compile the tex and import it to manim as SVGs, we just have a bunch of paths… and there is no way for the “ga” bit to know how high an “A” would have been (and the A can’t know where the bottom of the g would be). The next_to command only know the top, bottom, left edge, right edge, and center of the shape “ga”.

But on the other hand, this all feels backward to me in a sense. TeX is the most powerful typesetting engine we have. Why render two pieces individually and then try to typeset them in python by hand? Why not use TeX? There’s \bullet and \cdot and there’s \textbullet and \centerdot and \medbullet and \sqbullet and \smallblackcircle and … (and that “…” is \ldots btw).

The point is: let latex do what latex does best. typesetting. Try maybe

tex = Tex(“ga”, “$\bullet$”) and tex = Tex(“Aa”, “$\bullet$”)

you can even follow this with text = tex[0] dot = tex[1]

and continue on from there exactly as before.

complete list of latex symbols: http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-a4.pdf

[cobordism]

I will tag this as ‘wontfix’ because there is nothing we can do until SVG handling has been rewritten. Until then you’d need to either use LaTeX for alignment, or mess around by hand. (see comments above)