Re: drops module (draft)

[Marco Patzer <homerow@lavabit.com>]

On 2012–12–07 Peter Rolf wrote:

> Am 06.12.2012 19:35, schrieb Marco:
> > On 2012–12–06 Aditya Mahajan wrote:
> > 
> >> I always thought that shadows were possible to do in PDF (after all
> >> TikZ does it using some type of PDF primitives).
> > 
> > It is. I use MetaPost to draw the shadows using the shading
> > mechanism:
> > 
> >   withshading("circular", urcorner bottom_left, urcorner bottom_left, radius, 0)
> >   withfromshadecolor \MPcolor{c:transparent}
> >   withtoshadecolor   col;
> >
> 
> Don't mix Type2/3 with Type 4/5 shadings (see my answer to Aditya). They
> are all called 'shadings', but only the latter can be used for the
> creation of realistic looking drop shadows.

Thanks for pointing that out. I will have a look into my code again.

I was (and actually I still am) confused by the different shading
methods provided by MetaFun. I admit that I never read the PDF
reference which means that I don't know the shading internals. I
experimented a little and came up with a working solution to add
some eye-candy to presentations.

> And to repeat myself: there is nothing wrong with bitmaps.

I agree. Even Knuth designed his fonts as bitmaps (at least the
output is a bitmap). However, bitmaps always have a fixed size and
thus are not scalable.

> Take the best from both worlds ;-)

ACK

And thanks for this nice module and especially for the well-written
documentation.


Marco

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