On Tue, 29 Dec 2020, Garulfo wrote:

Which process would you advice to add « drop shadows » to any kind of metafun / metapost figures like: picture p; p := textext("MetaPost is fun!") shifted (10cm,10cm);

My current understanding of the required steps :

1- fill p with the shadow color

2- write it to an external metapost file (with savebuffer ?) ready for png export (outputformat := "png »;)

3- with lua, os.execute, and imagemagick prepare the shadow - extent the png file with a transparent background, to have room for blurring - blur it

4- import this png in context / Metapost (externalfigure), and center it with p figure

5- shift it according to the desired shadows distance and angle

6- apply the initial bounding box of p to the shadow, draw the shadow, draw the p picture

Actually, all this seems long and tedious, and contrasts with the already existing links between MetaPost / MetaFun and cairo + libpng.

There was a drops module by Peter Rolf, which provides exactly these features: https://mailman.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2016/084242.html It is not part of modules.contextgarden.net and the url in the previous post is no longer valid. I am CC:ing Peter and perhaps he can point to the updated location for the module. Aditya

Am 29.12.2020 um 22:56 schrieb Garulfo :

Which process would you advice to add « drop shadows » to any kind of metafun / metapost figures like: picture p; p := textext("MetaPost is fun!") shifted (10cm,10cm);

My current understanding of the required steps :

1- fill p with the shadow color

2- write it to an external metapost file (with savebuffer ?) ready for png export (outputformat := "png »;)

3- with lua, os.execute, and imagemagick prepare the shadow - extent the png file with a transparent background, to have room for blurring - blur it

4- import this png in context / Metapost (externalfigure), and center it with p figure

5- shift it according to the desired shadows distance and angle

6- apply the initial bounding box of p to the shadow, draw the shadow, draw the p picture

Actually, all this seems long and tedious, and contrasts with the already existing links between MetaPost / MetaFun and cairo + libpng.

I don’t know if that helps, but I’m using a stack of transparent objects to simulate drop shadows: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Drop_shadows No pixel images required. But I’d like to have a real text shadow instead of that box shadow. Happy New Year! Hraban