I would like a vardef macro to return the pair of a picture and a bounding box. I don't want to use the setbound operator, because as soon as I do that, I cannot access the components of the picture anymore with pathpart. I found metapost vardef returning multiple values https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/448740/metapost-vardef-returning-mul... on StackExchange but that is about returning multiple values of the same numeric type. Is it possible to have vardef return a set of (picture, path) or (picture, picture) in some way? If not, I need to make two vardef macros for each result type. I tried many things, amongst which: vardef Foo( expr w, h) % define pic pic end group,begingroup % define pic pic endif picture foo[]; foo = Foo( 2, 4);