Hello, Just to let you know - thanks to John Bowman (Michail Vidiassov is also working on it) these are some latest posts from asymptote developers on their forum - if anyone would like to play with asymptote, feel free to test. I didn't take a look, but John Bowman says that he needed null.tex to get context into interactive mode for some reason. Any clue about that? Mojca PS: I really really have to avoid the temptation to get distracted in the next few days/weeks unless I find an excuse that I need to make 3D/movies for my reports (which is not so unlikely to happen after all :) I have converted asycolors.sty; if anyone wants to take a look at asymptote.sty feel free to take it over. I might come back to it, but not right now. My quick first impression is that it does something similar to t-gnuplot, t-r, t-vim, t-lilypond, etc., that is: it defines some high-level commands, writes a file, lets asymptote process it and then includes the resulting graphic back. PPS: Recent Asymptote logs say "Updates to facilitate TeXLive builds." Sounds promissing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Good news: After digesting the advice /.../, I have been able to implement full support for a context tex engine in 2D. First of all, with TeXLive 2008 it is necessary to configure both lua and context: luatools --generate context --make We also rely on the empty tex file misc/null.tex. Hopefully everyone has that. We use this to get into context interactive mode, for the tex pipe (phase 1 of Asymptote's 2-phase typesetting system): context misc/null This was a crucial trick that I did not see documented anywhere. I didn't like the need for the \hbox but I too could not find a way around this; it seems that context takes liberties with the vertical spacing (glue?) otherwise, in a seemingly unpredictable manner. I was able to work around the one problem that I could forsee, with \eject (newpage() in asy, for multipage output). Everything appears to be working: label clipping, minipage, and even functionshading. This was the benefit of using specials; once the high-level code was in place, all of the low-level support was ready to go. The only thing that I haven't tested is inlinetex mode with the context tex engine. Could someone please test this for me? Thanks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I checked that -inlinetex -tex context appears to be generating the right files. Now all that needs to be done is for someone familiar with context to port asymptote.sty to a context module. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I forgot to mention that context support is committed to svn and will be in 1.74 release (likely tomorrow). Regarding fonts, one can either use the low-level TeX \font way using fontcommand or, as the following contextfonts.asy example illustrates, the high-level way (see the definition of font in plain_pens.asy): settings.tex="context"; texpreamble("\usetypescript[iwona][ec]"); texpreamble("\usetypescript[antykwa-torunska][t5]"); label("$A$",0,N,font("iwona")); label("$A$",0,S,font("antykwa")+red); ----------------------------------------------------------------------