[XeTeX] Fwd: MetaPost with XeTeX

[Robert Spence]

Some good news!

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com>
> Date: 03 May 2006 17:13:48  GMT+02:00
> To: spence at saar.de
> Subject: Re: MetaPost with XeTeX
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm waiting for approval to join the XeTeX mailing list I just found
> your thread), but you may forward my answer if you want.
>
> I succesfully managed to run MP from within XeTeX using ConTeXt (to
> correct myself: after Hans Hagen spent two hours and more trying to
> install XeTeX on my computer, MetaPost worked out-of-the-box).
>
> An example would be
>
> \starttext
> \startMPcode
>    fill fullcircle scaled 3cm withcolor red;
>    fill fullcirce scaled 3cm shifted (2cm,1cm) withcolor
> transparent(1,0.5,green);
> \stopMPcode
> \stoptext
>
> But you need the latest ConTeXt for that (version > 2006.05.02,
> perhaps you have to wait half a day before it's uploaded) - you can
> download it from http://www.pragma-ade.com/download-1.htm.
>
> The first circle was working out of the box, while Hans probably spent
> half a day trying to fix transparency.
>
> ConTeXt has wonderful support for MetaPost and its developer is
> hyper-active. It might be that the LaTeX packages would need slight
> changes first, but I have no idea how responsive their authors are
> and/or if you're able to fix the packeges alone.
>
> Labels can be typeset with another flavour of TeX - no doubt about it.
> I can't make them work at the moment (it might be both a bug in
> ConTeXt scripts and font initialisation issue), but I'm sure that this
> will be fixed reasonably soon.
>
> So it's not up to XeTeX, but up to macro packages to support MetaPost.
>
> You're invited to join the ConTeXt mailing list if you're willing to
> play with latest and greatest features. MetaPost is almost "native" in
> ConTeXt.
>
> Mojca