Re: Metapost - text alignment

["Rob McDonald" <rob a mcdonald gmail com>]

On 2/1/07, Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-02-01 at 09:36 +1030, Young, Robert wrote:
> > If we had a LaTex render, it would be a different story. No one has the
> > time to do one before 0.96 comes out. So my patch was aiming for
> > something that would work in most instances. Using text_line blows up on
> > equations, where as my proposed patch at least leaves the
> > right/centre/left alignment correct, and gets the odd text width wrong
> > (but within a couple of percent for sans, serif and monospace). I am
> > very keen to receive examples of where it doesn't work so that I can
> > improve it.
>
> Your patch blows up on regular text with underscores, like
> samples/render-test.dia.  They and other TeX special characters will
> have to be escaped if this is to be usable on common text.  So we face
> (again) the decision of whether formulas or text is the most common
> output that we should make sure to handle properly, and the other kind
> of output will require manual intervention.
>
> Maybe we can for now have it by default escaped and leave the unescaped
> version in there as a comment so that replacing that will be easy?

I think anyone using MetaPost is going to be able to handle special
characters and what not.  It is an obscure format which carries with
it an assumption of an advanced user.

I say leave it the way it is, if they need to escape characters, they
can do that.  If they want formulas and what not, they can figure that
out as well.

     Rob