On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 02:20:51PM +0200, Oliver Buerschaper wrote:
the fact that you have pieces in mkii is a side effect of dvitomp turning dvi output in mp pictures; in the process it combines glyphs that have no kerning and whatever spacing becomes shifts
Oh, I didn't know the pieces used to come about by accident... actually, by a rather favourable accident if I may add :-)
in mkiv the text is treated as a whole and that will not change
That's rather bad news... then essentially MetaPost is a lost case for retouching digital typography it seems. Will have to switch to Illustrator (with the Scriptographer plugin) for these tasks. Sadly, batch processing and TeX integration will be gone with that alternative.
I always develop a kind of romantic relationship with the tools I use, I either hate it and stop using it no matter what it can or can not do; I hate OpenOffice and Qt, for example, and I would never, willingly use either. On the other hand, when I love some tool I never turn my back to it, no matter what shortcomings it might have, love is blind. I love TeX, and though it has a horrible macro language, I keep using it. One don't just drop his tools just because he can't, yet, figure out how to make it do what he wants. You have to try harder, show your love, your commitment, it will certainly pay back. ;) Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer