[metapost] Problem with defaultscale

[Laurence Finston]

> Do you have time to provide a brief example? Or point me to where I might
> find an example?

I'm usually quite happy to make minimal examples, but I'm not a 
LaTeX user and I never use LaTeX for typesetting labels in MetaPost.  I 
don't even remember how it's done, otherwise I would have written one up.  
However, Taco has done so, so I'm off the hook.  

I don't want to start an ideological argument, but I don't really 
see the  advantage of using LaTeX for this purpose, since labels are 
usually just short snippets of text rather than documents.  You can get 
any font you want by simply using the `\font' command in a `verbatimtex 
... etex' block.  The advantage of doing this is that you can get many 
fonts at their proper size rather than scaling them.  Of course, for some 
sizes, the fonts will be scaled, anyway.

Changing the size of fonts in math mode is a genuine problem with plain 
TeX.  I don't know how (or if) LaTeX has a solution for this problem.  
However, it's not really that difficult to modify `plain.tex', if one 
needs text in math mode to have different sizes.  I don't usually bother.

Laurence

On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, John Kitzmiller wrote:

> 
> > > Any help with why:
> > >
> > > label(btex \sffamily Hallo etex, origin);
> > >
> > > works when:
> > >
> > > label(btex \large Hallo etex, origin);
> > >
> > > does not?
> > > (No file mpx314.aux.
> > >  !Undefined control sequence.)
> >
> > Presumably because `\large' is undefined.  You can define it in a
> > `verbatimtex ... etex' block.
> >
> > Laurence Finston
> >
> 
> Thank you, Laurence.
> 
> Do you have time to provide a brief example? Or point me to where I might
> find an example?
> 
> I am trying things like:
> 
> verbatimtex
> %&latex
> \def\large#1{\large{#1}}
> \begin{document}
> etex
> 
> with no positive result.
> 
> A further question is why \sffamily is defined and \large is not? They both
> work in a latex file.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John
> 
>