Re: Offtopic: TeX in MetaPost?

["John R. Culleton" <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Monday 19 December 2005 10:28 am, Michal Kvasni?ka wrote:
> Good evening.
>
> I apologize that I dare to post here such offtopic, but I feel this is
> the right place to get an answer.
> I try to write some general-purpose MetaPost macros for me with
> ConTeXt-like interface. For instance, I'd like something like this:
>     label(point, "label=$A$, xlabel=$x_A$, ylabel=$y_A$,
> ylabelshift=left, lines=no, dotstyle=bigdot, ...");
> I've done a lot of work and it almost works, but ... I failed to notice
> that TeX sequences are in normal cases included between btex ... etex
> and are preprocessed. In other words, they cannot be typeset as a
> string. I could use TEX macro, but it slows the process down in a
> horrible way.
>
> I think the best way is this: In the first run of MetaPost to flush out
> all TeX codes, then process it with TeX (texexec), and then to include
> it in the second MetaPost run. But I don't know how to do it? Can you
> help me or at least hint where I could find an answer? And BTW, is this
> a good idea at all? Isn't there a better/faster way?
>
> Many thanks for you kind help.
> Michal Kvasnicka

I presume you are familiar with Metafun which already provides a
Metapost facility in Context. 

Before you reinvent round objects called wheels please look over
the additional facilities provided by Pstricks, which can be run using
Context and the approproiate module.m-pstric.tex. Instructions
are embedded in the module. It may well be that the kind of
diagrams you are seeking to create in Metapost are already
available via Pstricks. There is a very readable Pstricks manual and a
supplement. 

How do Pstricks and Metapost differ? Well Pstricks is a higher
level language, aimed at creating specific things like x/y
charts, tree diagrams and so on. Matrapost is a lower level, more
generalized facility. Most tasks can be done in either. Common
cases will be more easily handled in Pstricks. More unusual
situations will require the more general power of Metapost. 

John Culleton