Re: Labeling of axes

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 01:42 PM 1/26/01 -0700, walter kehowski wrote:
>ConTeXtnicians,
>
>This is a MetaPost question, not a ConTeXt question, per se. Does anybody
know
>how to use a for loop to label axes and, secondly, how to pass paramters to a
>metapost file?
>
>For example,
>
>numeric u; u=1.0cm;
>for i=-10 upto 10:
>if not(i=0) lablel.lft(btex $i$ etex, (i,0)*u); fi;
>endfor;
>
>does not work. Any suggestions?

This is indeed a problem, since metapost only sees one btex/etex here and
not obe for every loop. 

This is why in context you can use the textext macro: 

beginfig(1) ;

  numeric u ; u = 1.0cm ;

  for i=-10 upto 10 :
    if not (i=0) :
      draw textext.lft("$" & decimal i & "$") shifted (i*u,0) ;
    fi ;
  endfor;

endfig ;

end

given that you have configured texexec well: 

  texexec --mptex thisfile.mp
  mptopdf thisfile.1 

will give you a nice axis (beware if you look into gs: mptopdf does not
overwrite an open file). 

[there are a few more text related tricks; also, i'm working on a module
for drawing axis etc]

Hans
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                                  Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma@wxs.nl
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