Re: drops module (draft)

[Peter Rolf <indiego@gmx.net>]

Am 07.12.2012 13:49, schrieb Marco Patzer:
> On 2012–12–07 Peter Rolf wrote:
> 
>> Am 06.12.2012 19:35, schrieb Marco:
>>> On 2012–12–06 Aditya Mahajan wrote:
>>>
>>>> I always thought that shadows were possible to do in PDF (after all
>>>> TikZ does it using some type of PDF primitives).
>>>
>>> It is. I use MetaPost to draw the shadows using the shading
>>> mechanism:
>>>
>>>   withshading("circular", urcorner bottom_left, urcorner bottom_left, radius, 0)
>>>   withfromshadecolor \MPcolor{c:transparent}
>>>   withtoshadecolor   col;
>>>
>>
>> Don't mix Type2/3 with Type 4/5 shadings (see my answer to Aditya). They
>> are all called 'shadings', but only the latter can be used for the
>> creation of realistic looking drop shadows.
> 
> Thanks for pointing that out. I will have a look into my code again.
> 
> I was (and actually I still am) confused by the different shading
> methods provided by MetaFun. I admit that I never read the PDF
> reference which means that I don't know the shading internals. I
> experimented a little and came up with a working solution to add
> some eye-candy to presentations.
>

Nearly everyone loves eye-candy in presentations. It distracts the
observer from the question "What am I doing here....?" ;-)

>> And to repeat myself: there is nothing wrong with bitmaps.
> 
> I agree. Even Knuth designed his fonts as bitmaps (at least the
> output is a bitmap). However, bitmaps always have a fixed size and
> thus are not scalable.
>

True. I haven't played around with Photoshop or Indesign for years, but
the old versions also used bitmaps for their drop shadows. If Adobe as
the inventor of PDF does it, ...

>> Take the best from both worlds ;-)
> 
> ACK
> 
> And thanks for this nice module and especially for the well-written
> documentation.
>
I tried my best (which means it took a looooooooooooong time). :-)

> 
> Marco
> 
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