Re: Metapost - text alignment

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

On 1/29/07, Young, Robert <Robert Young dsto defence gov au> wrote:
> I've used Rob McDonalds example macros and hopefully improved the
> metapost output. Please take a look at bug 332554 and let me know how I
> can improve it.
>
> Note that I've not used the draw_text_line. Because draw_string needs to
> know how to align the text, I've implemented draw_text and this calls
> draw_string. Sorry Lars, I just couldn't see any way around it (well, I
> didn't think very hard).


Rob,

The patch looks good to me.  IMHO, this is as far as we should go
until we have a LaTeX renderer in DIA.  (In terms of the MP output.
If Lars wants to implement it differently, thats fine, but I think
this outputs the best MP we can).

I'm not sure what the default size change from 3.0 to 2.05 does.

I know that when I used the cmr10 font, and 0.35 size in DIA, it would
output with "scaled 1.05".

10 pt / (72 pt/in) * 2.54 (cm/in) = 0.352777 cm.

So, I would expect 0.35 to give a scale factor less than one.

0.35 / 2.54 * 72 / 10 = 0.992126

So, there seems to be something a little amiss here (say 6% or so),
but I suspect your 3.0 to 2.05 change in the default size may be a bit
drastic.  Did you test with cmr10, or another font?  Maybe the fonts
have different base sizes from which they are scaled.

I have done all my MP work with cmr10 (so it would match my document).
So I haven't tested anything else.  And from back in the days when
the font size was mysteriously linked to the zoom level (strange bug
to find), I got in the habit of search & replace (in the *.mp text
file as needed) for 'scaled blah' to 'scaled 1.0'.

             Rob