So I tried your solution and I don't think it worked out to what I
needed but I also think that my description of the problem was poor.
My tex file includes images, they used to be .ps files and so I used
the psfrag package to have consistent fonts on my axis labels as I
did with my paper. The jphyschem requires that all figures be
in .tiff or .pdf format, so then I would have to include those in
a .tex file but when submitted with the standard gnuplot fonts, they
rejected it because of dissimilar fonts. What I'm looking for is a
way to implement latex fonts in pdf images of each figure.
I create the pdf images by generating a .ps file and then converting
to .pdf. In the creation of the first image, I need to use the latex
fonts (for both \varphi and V_+) because the jphyschem didn't like
it using helvetica. I looked online alot for how to use latex fonts
in octave graphs because I remember seeing it in the thread but I
can't find them now.
Right now, I'm on mac osx and octave 3.0.3.