Re: Ampersand in Metapost

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 14-5-2010 12:06, Marco wrote:

>   iii) Why should I better use \sometxt?

sometxt was introduced in mkii to avoid text processing mp, i.e. it is 
done at the context end in the current run and mp only gets dimensions; 
so, it avoids the nested tex run

in mkii there is some more trickery and much showed up whem for in 
instance Mojca wanted gnuplot to spit out mp

> What do you mean by »more reliable«? After having read your MyWay I would say
> that textext is more reliable because it can do dynamic text.

in mkiv textext is implemented differently; because we use mplib, 
processing time is less an issue anyway

> I created a testfile to compare textext and \sometxt. The points to compare
> were those you mentionend in your MyWay as advantages of \sometxt. The
> testfile »t.tex« is attached. I processed it with

in mkiv there should be no big difference as it all boils down to the 
same (sometxt has a command applied which textext doesn't)

> ConTeXt  ver: 2010.05.08
> luatex, version beta-0.60.1-2010042821
>
> Here are my results:
>
> -There is one obvious reason: speed
>
>      $ for i in `seq 5`; do context -mode=textext t | tail -1; done
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 128.008
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 37.893
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 37.900
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 38.391
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 38.029
>      $ rm t.{log,pdf,tuc}
>      $ for i in `seq 5`; do context -mode=sometxt t | tail -1; done
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 127.195
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 40.131
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 41.071
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 37.424
>      MTXrun | total runtime: 39.121
>
> Average runtime:
>      textext  variant: 56s
>      \sometxt variant: 57s
>
> That is the same. Maybe my test file is not appropriate to test the speed. I'm
> sure you have performed more advanced tests.

you use mkiv

> -Document-wide definitions are seen
>    [...] definitions with arguments will fail to work.
>
> The first line, a document-wide definition with arguments works in both
> versions.
>
> -Problems with expansion
>    [...]  as far as I remember math expressions (fractions perhaps) never
>    worked as they were supposed to
>
> The second definition is a math expressions with fractions. It seems to work.

th emkii variant has some more limitations than the mkiv version

> -Less characters to escape
>
> Yes, that's the topic of this thread. I don't know, I didn't check. The only
> check I performed was the ampersand and it needs the same workaround using
> \letterbackslash as textext.
>
> I know, your MyWay is old. Maybe some things are fixed now. But I don't see
> many advantages for me using it.

don't expect mkii and mkiv to be 100% compatible in this area (mkii is 
somewhat stretching things to the limit)

Hans


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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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