Hi, I read the 2000 thread on a MetaPost device in R. If I understand correctly, the main problem with the concept is that R wants the device driver to give back information on the size of strings/labels.
To the bet of my knowledge, MetaPost _does_ make it possible to measure the bounding box of text (see section 7.3: Measuring text in the MetaPost manual). For example, one could get the size of the bounding box of btex $\int_a^b x^2$ etex -- would that be enough to make an implementation possible? Or are the size of individual characters and kerning information necessary? Another question: can graphics devices be implemented solely in R (ie without writing C code)? I realize that it will be much slower, but first I would like to see how it works before writing in C. What source files should I be looking at? You may ask why I should bother about using Metapost. Well, I'd like my TeX documents to be more consistent typographically, and MP has quite a lot of useful features (such as the possibility to include its eps output in LaTeX directly, EVEN when generating PDF files with latexpdf). But the biggest bonus would clearly be the ability to typeset math formulas nicely. (I realize that this would require one to start a MetaPost process, but IMO the benefits would be worth the overhead). Is anyone else interested in a MetaPost device? Thanks, Tamas -- Tamás K. Papp E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (preferred, especially for large messages) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please try to send only (latin-2) plain text, not HTML or other garbage. ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help