On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Hans Hagen wrote:
Hi,
as some of you may know, there is an mplib project ..
last week taco and spent quite some time on exploring the integration in luatex (and therefore mkiv)
experiments with loadiing the format, processing graphics and conversion to pdf show a throughput of less than 0.001 seconds per graphic; a usual we did much timing and although experimental, the code is already pretty okay, just to give an idea:
mkiv lua stats : metapost processing time - 6.834 seconds (loading: 0.014 seconds, execution: 1.474 seconds, n: 15000)
indeed, that's 15K graphics in 7 seconds.
That is really impressive.
so, the next couple of months i'll start providing an adapted mp handling mechanisms. among the possible options are
- extensions based on pre/postscripts (instead of specials) - multiple mp engines (\startuseMPgraphic[metafun]{name} and such)
so, if you have specific wishes ... now is the time to let them know
Some questions (and hidden wishes) Does this mean that text between metapost graphic and context can be really transparent? Currently \sometxt does not work with all macros, (like an old feature request by Mojca to have two optional arguments for setting the font in the gnuplot module). Will mplib mean that the metapost code can place any tex box at the desired location? One thing which is really shaky in the current implementation is page anchors. That is, marking something in a paragraph and then using the page background to draw lines between different elements. Will such things be easier to do and work correctly with display math? (I want to use these effects in presentations, but have never managed to get a satisfactory solution that works in display math). I am assuming that there will be hooks so that packages like tikz to move to a mplib backend. Thanks, Aditya