graphics inclusion in metapost (real weird metafun)

graphics inclusion in metapost (real weird metafun)

[Hans Hagen]

Hi, 

A few days ago Santiago Muelas send me mail in which he discussed the
possibility to include graphic in metapost. That discussion focused at core
mp support (i.e. extending mp). As an experiment, I hacked graphic
inclusion support into the context mp special macros (those that also take
care of shading) and the result can be seen at: 

http://www.pragma-ade.com/pragma-tmp/metafun/metajoke.pdf    (metajoke.zip) 

There is also a zip there for those who want to play with it. All pdftex
formats [png,jpg,pdf] are supported as well as reuae of graphics. The main
drawback is that one has to know the aspect ratio of a graphic [but I can
envision multipass approach] and the a limitation is that one cannot scale
the 'currentpicture' afterwards. On the other hand, graphics can be
scaled/shifted/rotated ans obey clipping. It proved to be a nearly trivial
simple implementation. 

Hans

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                  Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
                      Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
 tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

another nice new metapost trick: outline fonts

[Hans Hagen]

Hi, 

After playing a bit with pstoedit i was able to cook up a utility that
enables metapost to handle outline fonts; think of: 

beginfig (1) ;
  graphictext
    "\framed[frame=off,width=10cm,align=normal]{\input tufte }"
    scaled 8
  % slanted .2
    withdrawcolor blue
    withfillcolor red
    withpen pencircle scaled 2pt ;
endfig ;

This also works in macros [like textext does] and uses makempy [a simple
perl script] to prepare a file suitable for mp. This is a rather generic
feature btw. An example can be found at:  

  http://www.pragma-ade.com/pragma-tmp/metafun/outline-1.pdf

The other trick, embedded graphics, can be found at:

  http://www.pragma-ade.com/pragma-tmp/metafun/metajoke.pdf

So, now we can make fancy titlepages, 

Hans
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                  Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
                      Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
 tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------