On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Hans Hagen wrote:
this is runtime tex into passed to the graphic ... imagine that we flush this to the mp file ... it can contain info that is not known in that session (like overlay info) which willbreak the mp run
the issue here is that a static graphic is processed in another, independent run, that's the whole idea behind static graphics (quick hack for independent graphics)
we can spend a lot of time to make it more advanced but within a year from now we will have mp as a library in tex which willreduce runtime to nearly zero (at least that 's what experiments show) so ....
Even when mp is available as a lib, it will not reduce runtime to nearly zero? The time to start a mp process will be negligible, but processing an mp file will still take time. In the mp diagrams that I have, processing each diagram takes about 10 sec [1]. Occasionally there are around 10-15 diagrams and compiling all of them takes about 2 minutes. With statics, the time for calculating the md5 sum of each mp file is negligible, and I can work with diagrams sources and text in the same file. Even after mp is available as a library, I will need statics. [1] metaobj is slow. I really hope that sometime in the future, metapost gets programming abilities of a real language. Maybe asymptote already does this, but it is too latex oriented. Aditya