[metapost] Trying to use MT1 to make outline fonts... (again)

[Dan Luecking]

At 07:47 AM 6/19/2012, mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote:

>On Tue, 19 Jun 2012, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> > 5) The MFBook tells me to do pickup pencircle xscaled yscaled rotated
> > and do "penstroke".

"penstroke" is a macro in plain.mf but it has nothing to do
with pens (elliptical or otherwise). It is a macro that
_simulates_ the stroke of a flat-nibbed pen (but also allowing
the pen to be resized and rotated during the simulated stroke).
One creates pairs of points (using the penpos macro, perhaps)
and then the penstroke macro builds and fills a closed path
that travels along the right-hand points of the
pairs and returns along the left-hand points.

The MFbook therefore does not tell you to "pickup pencircle ...
and do penstroke" because penstroke has nothing to do
with the current pen. Moreover. I cannot find any mention of
pickup in connection with penstroke in the MFbook. The MFbook
might somewhere tell you to pickup a pen and "do a pen stroke",
but that is something else entirely: it is the draw command.


>You cannot "do penstroke" in MT1 at all, because you can't do it in
>Metapost either, and MT1 is just a layer of macros and processing on top
>of Metapost.

The "penstroke" macro also exists in plain.mp so, in fact, you can
"do penstroke" in Metapost. You can also "do pen strokes", so I
don't know what this statementis supposed to mean.

Dan


Daniel H. Luecking
Department of Mathematical Sciences
Fayetteville, Arkansas
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html