3 Jul 2012 18:52
Python mplib bindings and MPost GUI frontend
Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa <at> gmail.com>
2012-07-03 16:52:21 GMT
2012-07-03 16:52:21 GMT
Hello. I was just reading the MPost manual and found that the basic binary is just a small wrapper on mplib. The C API is quite sparse (as remarked in the documentation itself) and obviously (because of LuaTeX) there are already bindings to Lua, but I am wondering about bindings to other languages. Frankly I would have expected a Python library to already exist (because most OSS libraries I've seen have Py bindings) but I'm unable to find one on the web with the keywords I searched for. I'm asking this because I'm thinking of writing a simple PyQt application which would help to draw simple 3rd order outlines (for font glyphs, obviously) based on user input using the MetaPost approach (as unlike Inkscape approach) -- especially with the user specifying only nodes and the application itself calculating the suitable curvatures (vide my query at http://www.tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2012-July/031842.html) except for the user throwing in some dirs like {left} {up} here and there. Obviously the application being a GUI would require to draw curves on the window itself and Qt can do that (http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qpainterpath.html) but instead of re-implementing the algorithm and possibly producing bugs, I would like to sort of embed MPost itself into the app and real-time render the MPost-calculated paths. I realize this is somewhat ambitious, but could potentially help a lot of people who would like to use MPost for such things. Of course if anyone is interested and would like to join hands, most welcome. (I myself am really thinking out loud here and have to see how much time I will be able to put in.) Or has someone already done this? -- -- Shriramana Sharma -- http://tug.org/metapost/
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