Re: [NTG-context] Relationship among mptopdf, mpost and latex

On 3/27/07, luigi scarso wrote:

If I have some time, i will check this.

On 3/25/07, nicola wrote:

...

Hi, some time ago I needed to include a png file into a MetaPost picture and I did it with the MetaFun macro externalfigure. I compiled the code with mptopdf and the result was fine. Since I had no previous experience with it, my code used LaTeX, not ConTeXt, for the labels.

hmm, a bit off-topic; after all, there is a latex mailing list. This is the context mailing list,

But mptopdf has no connection with any LaTeX package at all. It's a pure ConTeXt script, which used to support LaTeX input as well until ConTeXt has switched to ruby (and there should be no reason why it would not support that now).

so some user (like me for example) don't use latex anymore from some year at least.

Exactly that was the problem: no LaTeX user has ever updated the distribution (there was nothing comfortable to update after all until TeXLive 2007 came out) and tried to use mptopdf to process metapost code with LaTeX commands. I completely forgot (would never come to the idea to do that) to test that during transition to ruby (I only wrote countless mails to Hans complaining that the new version still didn't work). So I'm the guilty one ;) On the other hand there is rarely a need to use LaTeX in such labels (one can do the same on ConTeXt), but it's a matter of a habit. And since that worked already, it should be fixed to work again. I remember that Hans claimed that texmfstart (or texexec) could be convinced to process LaTeX documents (and there is some mention of latex command in core indeed), but I never managed to make it work.

A better approach: 1) "I have this latex-code that works well on ...... system/distro" (... follow latex code ....) (pdf in attachment)

pdfs in attachments tend to be long anyway. And LaTeX mailing lists will be unable to answer that specific problem which was introduced in ConTeXt.

2) "I want to do the same in ConTeXt" (if no, why did you wrote in this mailling list?) ", and I tried this:" (... follow ConTeXt code ....) (pdf in attachment, if compile well) "but it does not work (or works not better)."

Please, keep your tex/pdf as small and clear as you can; at leat don't attach anything, just write down a link where one can download code/pdf

He posted a minimal example: %%%%%%%%%%%%% verbatimtex %&latex \documentclass{article} \begin{document} etex beginfig(0); externalfigure "pic.png" scaled 15mm shifted origin; label.bot(btex $x$ etex, origin); endfig; end; %%%%%%% One should save it as something.mp and compile it with mptopdf [--someswitch] something.mp Mojca