RE: Metapost - text alignment

["Young, Robert" <Robert Young dsto defence gov au>]

> On 1/29/07, Young, Robert  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).

Thank. I agree we should go with a "works OK, but could be better" for
0.96 rather than aim higher and fail.

> 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've only tested with sans (phv) and monospace (cmtt), and adjusted the
scaling factor to make it look OK on the two test files.

> 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'.

Hmmm, my only testing has been with the test documents attached to the
bug 332544. Do you have a simple example you could send me or attach to
the bug report and I'll get it to work too?

Rob.