On Thu, 6 Dec 2012, Peter Rolf wrote:
Hi all,
a first version of the 'drops'-module (MkIV only) is available at
https://www.wuala.com/indiego/public/ConTeXt/drops/?key=caiCGLasLFmJ
Taken from the included documentation.. [..] 'drops' is a small extension for ConTeXt, that allows you to add drop shadows to rectangular regions (so called boxshadows). A working installation of ImageMagick (IM) is required to create the shadow graphics. The supported color spaces are CMYK, RGB and Gray, the file formats are limited to PNG and JPG. [..] Read the manual for detailed information.
Nice.
The attached example is just a small test file for the 'rotation' parameter (a compensation for the object rotation, so that the shadow stays at the given direction). You will find other examples in the documentation and there is also a 'pile' example with the complete source. The 'presets' pdf contains the predefined setups for different shadow (or frame) types and it's source is a good starting point for your own experiments.
This is a first draft, but most things work quite stable. If you want to help, test as much as possible. :-)
*You need a recent version of ImageMagick for this module.*
I always thought that shadows were possible to do in PDF (after all TikZ does it using some type of PDF primitives). Since you are the PDF expert, I am interested in knowing why you choose to go the ImageMagic route. In terms of interface, wouldn't it be better if this somehow interfaced with the background/overlay mechanism. For example, \definedropshadow[identifier][...options...] which will define an overlay that will call ImageMagic with appropriate parameters (and caching the results if speed is a concern), and then \externalfigure[name][background=identifier] should draw a dropped shadow around the image Aditya