On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 12:06, Marco wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 00:37:44 +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
PS: I would say: better use \sometxt which is far more reliable unless you have to use textext to do string manipulation. I don't know exactly which transformations are considered as »string manipulation«. I've read your MyWay on \sometxt. Brilliant piece of doc. But I've three questions.
i) Is it about MkII, MkIV or both?
It's mostly about MkII. In MKIV it should work, but it doesn't make such a huge difference since textext works as well as \sometxt in MkII. textext in MkII can sometimes be very inefficient.
ii) Is it still up-to-date?
Apart from a recently reported bug I don't know of any changes in MkII, but maybe I should write a few words about MkIV.
iii) Why should I better use \sometxt?
What do you mean by »more reliable«? After having read your MyWay I would say that textext is more reliable because it can do dynamic text.
Dynamic text counts as "feature" for me, not as "something that'"
I created a testfile to compare textext and \sometxt. The points to compare were those you mentionend in your MyWay as advantages of \sometxt. The testfile »t.tex« is attached. I processed it with
ConTeXt ver: 2010.05.08 luatex, version beta-0.60.1-2010042821
As already mentioned by Hans, the only difference,
Here are my results:
-There is one obvious reason: speed
Average runtime: textext variant: 56s \sometxt variant: 57s
That is the same. Maybe my test file is not appropriate to test the speed. I'm sure you have performed more advanced tests.
For gnuplot-generated graphics compile time has been reduced from 10 minutes to 20 seconds. But that's another story (many graphics, many text labels inside each graphic; textext was not optimized).
-Document-wide definitions are seen [...] definitions with arguments will fail to work.
The first line, a document-wide definition with arguments works in both versions.
But that's only true with MkIV. In MKII it's another story.
-Problems with expansion [...] as far as I remember math expressions (fractions perhaps) never worked as they were supposed to
The second definition is a math expressions with fractions. It seems to work.
Many math expressions have later been made unexpandable and started working, but it felt like a neverending story. Almost the same as the example that you were asking for.
I know, your MyWay is old. Maybe some things are fixed now. But I don't see many advantages for me using it.
If you are using MkIV and don't run into the same problem again, there is hardly a difference.
In fact, I have a problem getting random colors working. Take the following example (taken from my earlier thread).
% This line is needed to get »withcolor« to work? Yes, in MkII. In MkIV Hans wanted to take a different approach. \chardef\TeXtextcolormode\zerocount
% Produces empty rectangles for i=0 downto -3: ran; label(\sometxt{\bold{Test}}, (7cm,-4cm)) rotatedaround ((7cm,-4cm),i*20) withcolor transparent("normal", .2, (r,g,b)); endfor;
Hans replied. All in all - true, the most difference is seen in MkII. Mojca