Re: mplib

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Hi,
>
> as some of you may know, there is an mplib project ..
>
> last week taco and spent quite some time on exploring the integration in
> luatex (and therefore mkiv)
>
> experiments with loadiing the format, processing graphics and conversion
> to pdf show a throughput of less than 0.001 seconds per graphic; a usual
> we did much timing and although experimental, the code is already pretty
> okay, just to give an idea:
>
> 	mkiv lua stats : metapost processing time  - 6.834 seconds (loading:
> 0.014 seconds, execution: 1.474 seconds, n: 15000)
>
> indeed, that's 15K graphics in 7 seconds.

That is really impressive.

> so, the next couple of months i'll start providing an adapted mp
> handling mechanisms. among the possible options are
>
> - extensions based on pre/postscripts (instead of specials)
> - multiple mp engines (\startuseMPgraphic[metafun]{name} and such)
>
> so, if you have specific wishes ... now is the time to let them know

Some questions (and hidden wishes)

Does this mean that text between metapost graphic and context can be 
really transparent? Currently \sometxt does not work with all macros, 
(like an old feature request by Mojca to have two optional arguments for 
setting the font in the gnuplot module). Will mplib mean that the metapost 
code can place any tex box at the desired location?

One thing which is really shaky in the current implementation is page 
anchors. That is, marking something in a paragraph and then using the page 
background to draw lines between different elements. Will such things be 
easier to do and work correctly with display math? (I want to use these 
effects in presentations, but have never managed to get a satisfactory 
solution that works in display math).

I am assuming that there will be hooks so that packages like tikz to move 
to a mplib backend.

Thanks,

Aditya
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