Hans Hagen Play (37min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

All the time that I’ve been using TEX, I’ve been lucky enough to stumble into a solution just in time to save my day (or some project). In most cases it involved starting from scratch with the strong belief that TEX can do everything. After a while you reach a state where you can predict if something can be done or not.

An extreme example of operating on the edge is backgrounds that span paragraphs and pages, adapt to paragraph characteristics, and can be nested. Another mechanism that made some projects possible was HTML-like table building. Imagine combining these two mechanisms.

Such traditional solutions already benefit a lot from LUATEX for instance because METAPOST is integrated. Although we could stretch TEX’s lifespan in for instance the font arena it is no fun to stay eight bit among the Unicoders and OpenType lovers. But it can get worse. The last couple of years I started running into designers’ demands that simply are not possible in traditional TEX. Especially in automated typesetting you need tricks that are (with good reason) beyond standard TEX engines. Here we need to really adapt or extend the engine to get things done.

In this talk I will show a few examples and solutions. These also show the MKIV approach to solve such nasty problems. I will discuss some experiments with providing LUA based variants of internal functions that we can use in exceptional situations where performance (in terms of speed) is not an issue.

Hans Hagen Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

This talk discusses the way MPlib is integrated in the next generation of ConTeXt, tagged MkIV. The presentation will focus on the different aspects of integration as well as performance. The impact on workflows where heavy use is made of MetaPost integration will be discussed.

Mateusz Kmiecik Kraków, Poland Play (15min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The Logo language (turtle graphics) is recommended for teaching of informatics at secondary schools in Poland. It is a quite primitive language so young people quickly hit the limits when programing more advanced pictures. Could MetaPost be used to this end?

Hans Hagen Hasselt, The Netherland Play (31min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

LuaTeX offers a lot of new things. Having talked about desiIn March 2008 the first version of MPlib was released. Our first playground was converting the results produced by MetaPost into proper PDF code. In this talk I will show how such a conversion works. I will also demonstrate the possible gain in speed we can get in processing by integrating MPlib into LuaTeX.

Roberta Tucci Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

This article consists of three parts: a first part in which they are exposed some philological problems that occur when there is going to make an issue of a critical mathematics, a second type of description, which presents the tools information (MAUROTEX and MetaPost) have been chosen for the edition, a third party in which they are exposed briefly the results obtained from the use of these instruments.

Troy Henderson US Military Academy Play (37min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

MetaPost is a powerful graphics language (by John Hobby) based on Donald Knuth’s METAFONT with high quality PostScript output. An outstanding feature of MetaPost is that typeset fonts in the output graphics are consistent with those in TEX-based documents. In this talk we discuss a brief history of MetaPost as well as reasons for wanting to use it. We will also discuss some of the basic syntax of MetaPost coupled with several examples. Finally, we show how to include these graphics into LATEX documents as well as convert them to more web-friendly formats such as Portable Network Graphics (PNG) or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).