Re: Pstricks and Asymptote

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009, Curiouslearn wrote:

> Mojca, in case you read this, can you please let me know what the
> status on asymptote is.

I am not Mojca, but I'll comment on this anyways :)

I looked into integrating asymptote this summer (spent around a month 
going to asymptote macro code). Asymptote works fine with mkiv, if you use 
asymptote in a stand alone mode. Getting asymptote to run within context 
is easy or extremely difficult; depending on how you look at it.

If one wants to set everything the asymptote way, and simply want

\startASYcode
...
\stopASYcode

to copy its content to its file, create a asymptote figure and insert it 
in context, that is easy. You just need to tweak three lines of m-r.tex 
and you are done (m-r.tex is around 15 lines only). But that means that 
the user is responsible for setting all the fonts on his own (using 
asymptote syntax).

To be at par with metapost, we should have \startASYenvironment to set the 
fonts, \startASYinclusions to define macros, and then \startASYcode to 
create figures; maybe also have \defineASYgraphic (need to set 
OverlayWidth etc.) and \defineASYreusablegraphic. Ideally, we should also 
have the equivalent of \sometxt, but after going through asymptote code, I 
gave up on that (establishing a two way communication between asymptote and 
context is difficult).

Most of the above is easy (in terms of implementation); but one needs to 
understand asymptote and context to implement them. I did not completely 
understand the low level asymptote code, so after a while, integrating 
asymptote got low on my priorities. Maybe someone else should look at it 
seriously.

Aditya
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