I tried Metapost last year for a few graphs and liked the fact that it
is tightly integrated with Context. I found John Hobby's document a
good place to learn it and then used Hans' Metafun to learn further.
The reason I am looking at Asymptote and pstricks is because they have
libraries or functionality which Metapost lacks. For example, the tree
drawing library in pstricks. If Metapost has such a library I don't
know since I cannot find any document that explains the new things
added to Metapost other than what is mentioned in Metafun(2001). As
you said documentation is lacking.
Similarly, Asymptote allows one to find intersection points of any two
paths (even nonlinear paths). I am not sure whether Metapost can do
that.
I keep reading that Taco is working on development of Metapost.
However, I am not sure what exactly has changed. If there is any new
documentation, I would love to read it.
Thanks.
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 2:13 AM, Alan BRASLAU
On Monday 16 November 2009 23:57:28 Curiouslearn wrote:
Thanks everyone for replying.
Alan, the tikz module does not work with MKIV. From what I have read before, it seems it will not unless the creator of tikz makes some changes to tikz package so that it works with Context. I am not sure how likely that is.
I know that tikz is (currently) not working under mkiv, but I choose to ignore this as I expect that this will be fixed. I have not been concerned with this, as I no longer actively use tikz. Indeed, since learning (and still learning) metapost, I find it far superior: cleaner syntax, much more powerful... Tikz is/was a very welcome addition to laTeX, but metapost, whose syntax is more closely related to plain TeX, is more coherent with ConTeXt. So I now find the syntax of tikz uncomfortable under ConTeXt.
I still sometimes use LaTeX for the submission of articles to scientific journals (in particular using RevTeX), but I now use ConTeXt (\startTEXpage\stopTEXpage) to make the figures (that must be submitted as separate files in any case).
Alan
P.S. What I really liked about tikz is the quality of its documentation, in particular the tutorial that is very clear. The documentation for metapost (and metafun) is very good, but not so easy. *We* need to write a good tutorial! ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
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