[metapost] Beginners question

[Aditya Mahajan]

On Tue, 12 Sep 2023, Patrick Gundlach wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I try to define a user interface such as:
> 
> draw "some text" infont "myfontfamily" withstyle "bold";
> 
> where infant ... and withstyle ... are optional ( and the defaults should be "text" and "regular").
> 
> (How) Is it possible to achieve this?
> 
> Is it advisable do to so? Or should I rather create an interface such as
> 
> draw text ("some text", "myfontfamily", "bold")?

IMHO, both interfaces are okay and it is a matter of personal preference. 

Another option is to have a key value option:

draw Text [ font="myfontfamily", style="bold", text="some text" ];

It is relatively simply to define such key-value interface in ConTeXt. For example, see:

https://adityam.github.io/context-blog/post/new-metafun-interface/

Everything is defined in metafun, so it might also work in metapost+metafun as well but I have never tested this outside context.

Aditya