Hello,

Hans said he's in the metapost mode now :)

I have used lmt_outline in the following example and it is really an improvement over the previous outline "effect" because one can set the fillcolor and drawcolor separately.  (that was not possible before, right?)

\starttext
\definedfont[dejavusansmono*arabic]
\setupalign[r2l]
\startMPcode
draw lmt_outline [
  text = "سلام",
  drawcolor = "red",
  fillcolor = "white",
  kind = "reverse",
  align = "r2l",
] scaled 3mm;
\stopMPcode
\stoptext

1. This works well on a plain background.  I can specify the background color in fillcolor and get the outline effect.  When the background is an image, this does not work too well.  Can we use some clip trickery to allow for "transparent" fill?  Ideally I want to set the fillcolor to a special value that would lead to only the outlines drawn.

Now you'd say, that was already available via the outline "effect" before.  Not quite.  If a character is formed by more than one curve in the font, then we'd see some lines drawn inside the character.  The new lmt_outline mechanism allows one to paint over those.  Which brings me to the next problem.

2. The current mechanism draws/fills the characters one by one.  In Farsi/Arabic where we have joint characters, the boundaries of letters gets drawn even in the new mechanism.  See the attached PDF of the above MWE.  The text consists of four characters, the 2nd and 3rd form a ligature which is joined to the 1st character.  The 4th char is not joined and stands alone.  Now you see the red connection between the 1st char and the ligature following it.  It would be nice if the text was allowed to be processed as a whole (or at least be broken into space delimited pieces) which is drawn and then filled.

Thanks,

MHB