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I know this is a question that possibly does not belong to pure TeX, as MetaFont is part of a project to which TeX relates, ie as part of building TeX. My question is as follows: I call MetaFont from my bash terminal. and then provide the expr entry (see below).

    #mf
This is METAFONT, Version 2.7182818 (TeX Live 2019/Arch Linux) (preloaded base=mf)
**expr
(/usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/source/public/knuth-lib/expr.mf
gimme an expr: 4+5-8+4
>> 5
gimme an expr:

Now I wanted, instead of typing an expression, that I could write some command to have metafont read a line from a values.txt (see below) file containing the expression 4+5-8+4 in the first line e etc.

values.txt:

4+5-8+4
4+5-8+7
4+5-8+13

My output should be:

5
11
17

Is there any way to do this?

Improve this question
5
  • 1
    you could use the commandline mf expr < values.txt but why use expr which is just an infinite loop reading standard in, rather than have a normal metafont file as input?
    – David Carlisle
    Jan 7, 2020 at 18:24
  • @DavidCarlisle ThankXD! I am trying to use metafont within a python subprocess module to automatically read multiple lines as in values.txt, perform the operations, and direct each result of each line separately to a result.txt file containing each result separated by line respectively with respect to values.txt . I will try from now on to draw inspiration from your advice.
    – Yaacov NNNNM
    Jan 7, 2020 at 18:35
  • @DavidCarlisle Your suggestion solves the whole question but should I close this question?
    – Yaacov NNNNM
    Jan 7, 2020 at 18:49
  • 1
    I may as well post an answer, we don't get many metafont questions, and egreg is always happy to see me pick up a few points:-)
    – David Carlisle
    Jan 7, 2020 at 18:50
  • @DavidCarlisle I understand :-) kkkk. In the meantime I need to figure out how to write output to a file without printing all the extra commands that are shown.
    – Yaacov NNNNM
    Jan 7, 2020 at 18:53

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

You can use your shell facilities to take standard in and standard out from files, so

 mf expr < values.txt  > results.txt

would put the results in results.txt:

This is METAFONT, Version 2.7182818 (TeX Live 2019) (preloaded base=mf)
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/fonts/source/public/knuth-lib/expr.mf
gimme an expr: >> 5
gimme an expr: >> 8
gimme an expr: >> 14
gimme an expr: 
! Emergency stop.
...
Improve this answer
7
  • Thanks now I need to send to an output file only the results. I did mf expr < values.txt > results.txt, but the result.txt file ended up containing all terminal output instead of just the results of operations. I will try this with regex or some functionality in python. Not sure what to limit what should be sent to
    – Yaacov NNNNM
    Jan 7, 2020 at 18:57
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    @DiegoBneiNoah expr.mf seems to be only 5 lines and is as I say an iinfinite loop so it only ends if you get an error, I'm sure you could write a similar file that output more carefully and accepted some specific term to stop cleanly.
    – David Carlisle
    Jan 7, 2020 at 19:00
  • As I understand it if I modify one of these lines string s[]; s1="abra"; path p[]; p1=(0,0)..(3,3); p2=(0,0)..(3,3)..cycle; tracingonline:=1; scrollmode; forever: message "gimme an expr: "; s0:=readstring; show scantokens s0; endfor. What kind of programming language is this? MetaPost?
    – Yaacov NNNNM
    Jan 7, 2020 at 19:44
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    @DiegoBneiNoah it's metafont (I assumed you knew that to start with???) metapost is a later system derived from metafont. But metafont is a font design language, what are you using it for if not designing fonts?
    – David Carlisle
    Jan 7, 2020 at 20:06
  • 1
    using metafont for math from python seems a very bizarre choice, but it's a free world:-)
    – David Carlisle
    Jan 7, 2020 at 20:20

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