[metapost] Enormous number has been reduced

Troy Henderson thenders at gmail.com
Sat Oct 23 15:42:04 CEST 2010


Juan,

Unfortunately, MetaPost cannot handle large numbers.  It's a
limitation of fixed point arithmetic (which MetaPost) uses.  In my
opinion, it is the biggest limitation that MetaPost possesses.

That being said, it looks like you're going to have to scale all of
your numbers down manually before inputting them into MetaPost.  In
general, you should always be able to do this (as it took me a while
to figure out how design my program so that the numbers were the right
size).

You can try the sarith package which will treat the large numbers as
strings and then do arithmetic on the strings.  It's not the most
elegant solution, but it can be helpful.

Troy Henderson


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