Re: Greek characters in metapost (solution)

[Ron van Ostayen <R.A.J.vanOstayen@WbMT.TUDelft.NL>]

I've finally found what was causing the disappearance of the $\alpha$ in 
  the MP-figure.

RECAP:

This is a LaTeX and MP problem, but I think it could be a ConTeXt 
problem if you take the long way to your PDF-result.
(context, dvips, ps2pdf)

MP-file 'test.mp'
===================
% BEGPRE
verbatimtex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
etex
% ENDPRE

beginfig(0);
label( btex $x-\alpha-x$ etex, (0,0));
endfig;

% BEGPOST
verbatimtex
\end{document}
etex
% ENDPOST

end.
===================

LaTeX-file 'test.tex'
===================
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics{test.0}

$x-\alpha-x$
\end{document}
===================

Now, if we run:

mpost --tex=latex test
latex test
dvips -Ppdf test -o test.ps
ps2pdf test.ps test.pdf

the resulting test.pdf doesn't show the -\alpha- in the MP-figure

This is caused by the settings (at least for the texlive distribution) 
in config.pdf which is called by the -Ppdf option.

In this file the option G is set which means:

% Character shifting. You want to do this using the BlueSky/AMS/Y&Y fonts.
% It remaps certain ``control character'' positions to an another range
% where these characters are repeated. This character shifting works wround
% bugs in some tools such as older versions of the Acrobat Reader.

Apparently, there is a conflict between the shifted characters in the 
text and the non-shifted characters in the MP-figure.

So, I have turned this option off (hopefully without any repercussions),
and all is well.

Thanks for all your help.

Ron