Thanks Bruce for your very helpful reply! 

The reason for my question was indeed consistency, e.g. ensuring figure captions stay up to date with what the figures show when changing parameters. Thinking more about it, the second solution you mention seems to be a better option, though - I can simply define the parameters in an external file and read it from both the PDF solver and ConTeXt to ensure consistency. Thanks for mentioning it! 

Thank you also for mentioning \executesystemcommand, which I was not aware of! 

Best regards,
Florent

Le dim. 15 sept. 2024 à 21:31, Bruce Horrocks <ntg@scorecrow.com> a écrit :


> On 14 Sep 2024, at 21:46, Florent Michel <florent.m42@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> TL;DR: Could building LuaMetaTeX with the `-fPIC` flag for the Lua library have negative consequences? Is there a better way to be able to call external C functions from ConTeXt?

This seems a bit drastic. Why can’t you achieve what you want to achieve by using other methods?

For example you could setup a workflow whereby you pre-calculate your DE’s and format the results to include as input files. Or you could pre-calculate your DEs and plot them using one of any number of plotting programs and include the plots as TIFFs or PNGs.

If you’re familiar with compiling C code using tools like `make` then why not use a makefile to control the production of your DE plots and your ConTeXt document to ensure that everything is consistent?

If you absolutely must run the DE calculations as the ConTeXt document is processed then there is \executesystemcommand.


Bruce Horrocks
Hampshire, UK

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