How do I get mathematical fonts to Illustrator?

I totally, totally feel your pain.

When I was writing my dissertation on string theory I encountered the same issue. I managed to develop a pipeline which seems to work quite well:

1. Draw your graphs/images in Illustrator.
2. Use http://latex2png.com/. Type your latex equation in there, then preview at 2000 dpi.
3. Save the image, then load into Illustrator. Alternatively, you can speed things up by using a screencapture software (e.g. ShareX) so you can skip the image saving+loading process.
4. When in Illustrator, select your imported equation image and choose Object --> Image Trace --> Make and Expand. It is very important to obtain a high dpi image for this step to work favorably.
5. Your equation should now be a vector graphic.
6. Select your new vector graphic equation and choose Object --> Ungroup. This will separate the white spaces in your equation from the black content that you need.
7. Select the white spaces and delete them.
8. You now have a fully editable equation looking exactly like it does in Latex. You can scale/adjust and colour to your requirements.

Using these same steps, I have managed to create things like in the images below:

Hope that helps,

Hassan

I think it's worth mentioning that, if you're using Mac OS X, LaTeXiT solves this problem in a simple, fast way. Open the program, enter your equation, render it and then drag it into Illustrator. Done.

This will only work if you make sure your images export with outlined fonts. To do this, go to the settings panel of LaTeXiT, and change "Export format of images: " to be "PDF with outlined fonts". Like so:

I use Illustrator a lot and certainly understand your dilemma. As pltuon states, you can get LaTeX fonts into Illustrator but you will not get the capability of LaTeX kerning and other typographic features automatically. It is also possible to write the text in LaTeX and import the pdf into Illustrator and cut and paste the text/equations from the pdf to the Illustrator file, given that fonts are scalable and available to both as stated by Herbert. Nevertheless, I would like you to consider using tikz-pgf as an option. If I understand the types of graphs you try to draw they would be well suited for tikz-type drawings.