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Is there a way to get outlines for a TeX label in MetaPost, containing something reasonably complex, say: $\sum_{x=0}^{10}x^2$? I know that I can get outlines for separate glyphs using glyph, but how to preserve a layout?

Sergey Slyusarev
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  • Are you using "pure" MetaPost or are variants allowed? ConTeXt has some outlining functions, but I'm not sure this answers your question. –  Jan 23 '21 at 19:32
  • In general I'm interested in a solution which would work with standalone MetaPost, but a ConTeXt solution would help too. – Sergey Slyusarev Jan 23 '21 at 19:45
  • To be precise, I believe I know how to do it in ConTeXt, but it doesn't work in standalone MP. – Sergey Slyusarev Jan 23 '21 at 19:57
  • Another way is going wild: pdflatex > pdf2ps > pstoedit or latex > dvips > pstoedit to get a MetaPost file, perhaps? –  Jan 23 '21 at 20:41
  • This would work for one-off tasks, for sure, but it would be quite inconvenient to do it from within MetaPost on larger scale. – Sergey Slyusarev Jan 23 '21 at 20:49
  • You need Lua to get access to the outlines, so you'll need to use either ConTeXt or LuaTeX+mplib. – Henri Menke Jan 24 '21 at 13:17
  • @HenriMenke This could be a soultion, but then I'd need to be able to transfer the outlines to standalone MP. Hence this question: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/580214/convert-a-path-to-string-save-path-to-a-file-in-metapost Or maybe there's another way to achieve this? – Sergey Slyusarev Jan 25 '21 at 08:58

1 Answers1

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This is what for e within p does, where p is a picture variable. Consider this small example:

input TEX
picture p; p = TEX("$\sum_{x=0}^{10}x^2$");
for e within p:
    if textual e:
        message "(" & decimal xpart e & "," & decimal ypart e & ") " 
                    & fontpart e & " " & textpart e;
    elseif stroked e:
        show pathpart e;
    fi
endfor
end

if you run this through plain mpost you should get this output:

(0,7.472) cmex10 P
(10.5162,5.0091) cmr7 10
(10.5162,-2.9888) cmmi7 x
(15.0339,-2.9888) cmr7 =0
(27.2797,0) cmmi10 x
(32.9736,3.6154) cmr7 2

which tells you the position, the font used, and the ASCII character used in that font. (Note that the sum symbol is "P" in cmex10). And from this you can use glyph to get the outlines for each character in the textpart string.

From my experiments, this only works with plain mpost. I do not get the same output from lualatex + luamplib -- I guess because the font management is so different.

Slightly more complete example

prologues := 3;
outputtemplate := "%j%c.eps";
input TEX
beginfig(1)
picture p; p = TEX("$\displaystyle\sum_{x=0}^{10}x^2$");
for e within p:
    if textual e:
        pair o; o = (xpart e, ypart e) scaled 100/8; 
        for i=1 upto length textpart e:
            string s; s = substring (i-1, i) of textpart e;
            picture g; g = glyph ASCII s of fontpart e scaled 1/8;
            picture out; out = image(
            for ee within g:
                draw pathpart ee;
            endfor);
            draw out shifted o;
            o := o + (xpart lrcorner out, 0);
        endfor
    fi
endfor
endfig;
end

but I am not sure I have quite understood the spacing and scaling information. The documentation is a bit sparse...

enter image description here

Compatibility with luamplib

Note that (at present) the ideas shown here only work with plain Metapost. The built-in TEX() macro that is provided by luamplib (for use with lualatex) returns a picture with just one "part" and that part has no "textual" elements in it, and the only "stroked" part is the bounding box of the typeset text.

Thruston
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