Am Donnerstag, den 13.10.2011, 00:28 +0200 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 00:13, Paul Menzel wrote:
Am Mittwoch, den 12.10.2011, 07:36 +0200 schrieb Alan Braslau:
Metapost can now perform calculations in double precision floating point. At this time, it is in the svn version and does not work yet as such integrated in ConTeXt (through mplib). Taco promises this for soon...
great to hear that. Just to clarify, with »now« you mean MetaPost v2, do not you?
No, 1.750. The version 2 is not quite ready yet, but the version 1.750 already deals with floating point numbers.
Thank you for the clarification/correction.
Taco, I hope you get there without a lot of problems showing up. If you need testers a good option would be to integrate that into ConTeXt Standalone as an option.
It will become part of distribution as soon as it gets out, but Taco was busy enough organizing conference and dozens of other things. Just give him some time. I bet that he also wants to update documentation, do final bugfixing etc. instead of just releasing a random snapshot.
Of course the user would have to make a conscious decision by enabling this “beta” release. If people could test this and with the right announcement I hope that some people would step up to test and contribute by submitting bug reports or writing documentation.
One thing coming to my mind though that hopefully the wheel is not reimplemented. I guess Gnuplot can do a lot already, but on the other probably not as neat as Metapost when we want to color certain areas.
Can you please specify your question more precisely?
I meant coloring part of the area below a graph. For example if you look at the graphic for Riemann sums on page 51 of the document »Learning MetaPost by Doing« [6].
Gnuplot terminal uses metapost output. Gnuplot has some support for transparency, even though I'm not exactly sure if one can specify transparent colors for lines, only for fills. But you can always simply redefine line type colors to be transparent.
Gnuplot brings all kinds of other problems like dependency on external tool. If you have enough time to create nice plots in metapost, it is better to avoid external dependency as a general rule. But if you have more questions about it, feel free to ask. I might be able to help you.
Well my only question would be, why should someone use Gnuplot then? Is it only for people already knowing Gnuplot? Or also because it is a little less work to define the coordinate system and legends? Otherwise MetaPost seems to include all functionality Gnuplot offers and seems to offer more possibilities, does not it?
The ConTeXt terminal was almost included until developers realized that they wanted me to throw away some code for handling units and replace that code with something buggy (like "size 10cm,10" -> (10cm,10cm); "size 10,10cm" -> (0.35cm,10cm) or (25.40cm,10.00cm) depending on weather). Now I need to either rewrite part of my code or rewrite part of core code or convince them why keeping the old code.
I remember a thread about that [9]. Thanks, Paul [6] http://staff.science.uva.nl/~heck/Courses/mptut.pdf [9] http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2010/054196.html