[comp.text.tex] MF woes

byron@archone.tamu.edu (Byron Rakitzis) (01/31/91)

I'm just getting into using MF, and I'm stumped by a particular
problem. Please reply to this article if you feel like helping
out an MF-ignoramus.

I am designing a font where many of the shapes are shared between
letters. The way I am drawing the shapes is as follows:

beginchar("d" ......)
....
<stuff>
daq(....);
...
endchar;

where daq is a macro that draws the bowl shared between d,
a, and q. The problem is that MF complains about equations
in daq being redundant. i.e., after the a has been rasterized,
when the chardef for d comes along, MF stops and complains.
My question is, how do I make such equations "local" to a
particular chardef? I tried using begingroup and endgroup
in the naive way:

begingroup;
	daq();
endgroup;

but this did not work.

daq is a macro which calls penpos and penstroke, as well
as setting up a number of (standard) relations for the
dimensions of a d-a-q-bowl.

Thanks very much for your help.

Byron.
--
Byron Rakitzis
byron@archone.tamu.edu

jg@prg.ox.ac.uk (Jeremy Gibbons) (02/01/91)

byron@archone.tamu.edu (Byron Rakitzis) writes:

> My question is, how do I make such equations "local" to a
> particular chardef? 

The obvious way is to have new x and y variables for each character: your
`beginchar' macro should include `numeric x[], y[]' (if you're using
plain.mf's convention of arrays of x and y coordinates).

*-----------------------------------------------------------------------*
|  Jeremy Gibbons (jg@uk.ac.oxford.prg)   Funky Monkey Multimedia Corp  |
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------*