| Dotted and Dashed Lines in METAFONT (2007) | |||||||||||||
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| We show how to draw evenly dotted and dashed curved lines in METAFONT, using recursive refinement of paths. METAPOST provides extra primitives that can be used for this task, but the method presented here can be used for both METAFONT and METAPOST. Introduction Knuth's METAFONT has powerful facilities for manipulating and drawing curves or `paths'. These facilities are generally sufficient for METAFONT's primary intended purpose, namely drawing letters. However, METAFONT is also very well suited to producing technical diagrams; for this secondary purpose, METAFONT lacks a valuable facility---that of drawing evenly dotted and dashed curves. In this paper we show how to remedy this shortcoming, using the facilities that METAFONT does have available. John Hobby's METAPOST is an adaptation of METAFONT for producing PostScript output rather than bitmaps. METAPOST was primarily intended for producing technical diagrams (Don Hosek reports Hobby as saying, `Well, you could use it for g... | |||||||||||||
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