Am Donnerstag, den 13.10.2011, 00:28 +0200 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
> On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 00:13, Paul Menzel wrote:
> > Am Mittwoch, den 12.10.2011, 07:36 +0200 schrieb Alan Braslau:
> >
> >> Metapost can now perform calculations in double precision floating point.
> >> At this time, it is in the svn version and does not work yet as
> >> such integrated in ConTeXt (through mplib). Taco promises this for soon...
> >
> > great to hear that. Just to clarify, with »now« you mean MetaPost v2, do
> > not you?
> 
> No, 1.750. The version 2 is not quite ready yet, but the version 1.750
> already deals with floating point numbers.

Thank you for the clarification/correction.

> > Taco, I hope you get there without a lot of problems showing
> > up. If you need testers a good option would be to integrate that into
> > ConTeXt Standalone as an option.
> 
> It will become part of distribution as soon as it gets out, but Taco
> was busy enough organizing conference and dozens of other things. Just
> give him some time. I bet that he also wants to update documentation,
> do final bugfixing etc. instead of just releasing a random snapshot.

Of course the user would have to make a conscious decision by enabling
this “beta” release. If people could test this and with the right
announcement I hope that some people would step up to test and
contribute by submitting bug reports or writing documentation.

> > One thing coming to my mind though that hopefully the wheel is not
> > reimplemented. I guess Gnuplot can do a lot already, but on the other
> > probably not as neat as Metapost when we want to color certain areas.
> 
> Can you please specify your question more precisely?

I meant coloring part of the area below a graph. For example if you look
at the graphic for Riemann sums on page 51 of the document »Learning
MetaPost by Doing« [6].

> Gnuplot terminal uses metapost output. Gnuplot has some support for
> transparency, even though I'm not exactly sure if one can specify
> transparent colors for lines, only for fills. But you can always
> simply redefine line type colors to be transparent.
> 
> Gnuplot brings all kinds of other problems like dependency on external
> tool. If you have enough time to create nice plots in metapost, it is
> better to avoid external dependency as a general rule. But if you have
> more questions about it, feel free to ask. I might be able to help
> you.

Well my only question would be, why should someone use Gnuplot then? Is
it only for people already knowing Gnuplot? Or also because it is a
little less work to define the coordinate system and legends?

Otherwise MetaPost seems to include all functionality Gnuplot offers and
seems to offer more possibilities, does not it?

> The ConTeXt terminal was almost included until developers
> realized that they wanted me to throw away some code for handling
> units and replace that code with something buggy (like "size 10cm,10"
> -> (10cm,10cm); "size 10,10cm" -> (0.35cm,10cm) or (25.40cm,10.00cm)
> depending on weather). Now I need to either rewrite part of my code or
> rewrite part of core code or convince them why keeping the old code.

I remember a thread about that [9].


Thanks,

Paul


[6] http://staff.science.uva.nl/~heck/Courses/mptut.pdf
[9] http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2010/054196.html