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John Bowman wrote:
In regard to adding support for ConTeXt or plain TeX to Asymptote, it should be no problem to do this, but perhaps someone on this list can help provide some preliminary information, particularly regarding item 1 below on how best to rotate text at an arbitrary angle. Also, since I am not sure what the precise planned use of a plain tex/ConTeXt engine here is, it isn't clear to me whether the miniltx solution below would be an acceptable solution.
i cannot answer for other users but i guess that they want a more integrated approach, i.e. include a code in the doc source, write style info at runtime, etc latex and context differ too much from what users wrote to this list, i understood that much tex related stuff in asymptote is hard coded, so it's probably enough when all the strings (in the c source) that now contain latex code can be configured; there is no need for you to look into context, when things can be configured, the users will do that for you
Perhaps someone can also explain why so many context users are interested in this feature? Why exactly can't they let Asymptote do its typesetting with latex behind the scenes and then import the resulting ps or pdf files in context? Is the issue just that latex might not be installed? If so, the
indeed, esp when they use the so called minimal distributions;
miniltx style file (which appears to be part of plain tex) seems like a viable and simple solution.
In regard to the remark I saw posted about "monster eps" files, use the -aZ option and you will see that Asymptote output files are as compact as those of MetaPost. If you want tex labels, you have to process MetaPost output through dvips, etc. Asymptote simply does this automatically, perhaps giving some users the illusion that Asymptote files are bigger. In other words, you should compare the final postscript files that MetaPost produces, not the intermediate ones (I recall that there is a MetaPost command for running MetaPost output through dvips too).
in context dvips is not used for mp graphics; context comes with an integrated mp output parser; this means that integration is also efficient (handy when you have a couple of hundred mp graphics) esp with regards to resources i suppose that others can comment on the rest of your mail Hans -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------