Re: Metapost and TeX [OT]

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Brooks Moses wrote:

>On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 10:48:42PM -0400, skhilji@tampabay.rr.com wrote:
>  
>
>>I don't have any experience in metapost.  I would appreciate if someone would
>>please answer this question without me having to do thru tutorials and
>>metapost source code.
>>
>>I was wondering how does metapost talk to TeX?  Quicky glancing through the
>>metafun book, I found out that you can super-impose text typeset by
>>TeX on top of a diagram.  I imagine you could do the same with
>>mathematical equations too.
>>    
>>
>
>The following is as I understand it; others can I'm sure correct any
>misunderstandings:
>
>Metapost dumps out a TeX file, consisting of any header commands
>specified in the Metapost file, and whatever is between btex and etex
>tags.  It also puts in stuff so that what's between each pair of tags
>gets put on its own page.  (This is actually done with the mpto command,
>rather than in Metapost itself; if you just run that, you can examine
>the output to see what TeX commands it uses.)
>
>TeX is then run on this file, creating a .dvi file.
>
>Metapost then reads in the .dvi file, using that to create the typeset
>text that appears in the output Postscript file.
>  
>
you miss a step: a mpx file is created from the dvi file; an mpx file is a bunch of metapost pictures that will replace the btex..etex's in the mp file 

Hans 

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