Re: [matplotlib-devel] doing tex support the right way

[Darren D. <dd...@co...>]

On Monday 23 January 2006 18:27, Robert Kern wrote:
> Darren Dale wrote:
> > I would like to ask for some advice from those out there who have
> > experience dealing with fonts and text layout.
> >
> > At the end of this message is the output of dvitype, which translates a
> > dvi file (in this case a file typesetting "0.8" in ptmr7t fonts) into
> > human readable output. I have considered writing a dvi parser for mpl,
> > intending to extract the information necessary to render text with mpl's
> > existing font and text support. There is some more information at
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVI_(TeX) and
> > http://www.math.umd.edu/~asnowden/comp-cont/dvi.html#setchar.
> >
> > Is this worth pursuing? If I could make it work, mpl's only external
> > dependency would be TeX/LaTeX, even dvipng would not be required.
>
> Quite probably. dvitype is new to me. Doing a DVI interpreter for mpl and
> Chaco has been on my list of things to look at for some time. The things
> stopping me (besides the density of the DVI standard) was that all of the
> readable code I found for interpreting DVI files has been GPLed.
>
> You will need to access the parameters defined in the TeX Font Metric
> files, I think. I recommend using tftopl(1) to convert them to a parseable
> form.

How does matplotlib render glyphs, does it use freetype? Would matplotlib be 
able to render tex's fonts with the existing codebase, or would I have to 
delve into metafont?